


Summer Kings

by spacestationtrustfund



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: F/M, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-27
Updated: 2015-12-05
Packaged: 2018-05-03 16:39:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,189
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5298611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/spacestationtrustfund/pseuds/spacestationtrustfund
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blue wants the group to do something over the summer. Gansey wants to do whatever Blue wants to do. Ronan wants everyone except Adam to leave him alone. Adam wants to know what is actually happening. Noah wants to feel like part of the group.</p><p>(Also known as: the AU in the sense that no one dies and everyone is happy eventually and they spend the summer doing stupid fun things like the stupid fun dorks they deserve to be.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blue plans. Gansey mopes. Adam sleeps. Ronan complains. Noah bothers. The usual. Plus, Chainsaw, everyone's favourite carrion bird devoted to Ronan Lynch.

RONAN

It was not the average boy who could speak to trees, much less in archaic Latin. The average boy also was not entrenched in his best friend’s quest for a dead Welsh king, did not live in an abandoned manufacturing plant with the previously-mentioned best friend and a murder victim, had a family that was not composed half of dreams and half of people, could not create nightmarish monsters from nothing, and knew better to believe in such things.

Ronan Lynch had always prided himself in not being average.

At the present moment, he was sitting in the passenger seat of his best friend Richard Campbell Gansey the Third’s shitty orange Camaro, listening to Gansey prattle on. Gansey’s typical conversational topics included Owen Glendower, the supposedly-sleeping Welsh king whom Gansey believed he was destined to find; ley lines, or other supernatural phenomena which interested him; Blue Sargent, who sat in the backseat between Adam Parrish and Noah Czerny; or various other historical or magical objects.

Today it was something which Ronan found far more terrifying: summer plans.

“Jane, I was thinking we could go to Nino’s,” Gansey was saying, referring to the local teenage haunt, a glitteringly shabby diner. He was talking to Blue, although her name wasn’t Jane. “Do you have to work?”

Blue shook her head, her short black hair escaping from its hasty clips and whipping both Adam and Noah across the face. “No. Not today. Nino’s sounds good—maybe we could catch a movie or something later? I don’t know what’s playing.”

Ronan almost sniggered at the idea that someone like Gansey would do something like _catch a movie._ He caught Adam’s gaze in the mirror on the sun visor, and rolled his eyes dramatically.

Adam raised his eyebrows minutely. He mouthed, _A step down for the rich, huh?_

Ronan looked away.

_Socialising with the lower classes._

Everything was Adam’s fault.

“There’s a showing at two, I think,” Blue was saying. She had Gansey’s phone in her hands, and was doing something with it. Ronan had never been one for cell phones, and preferred to ignore his as often as possible. She looked very small, albeit fierce, from her position in the back, her messy hair refusing to stay contained. Pulling on he back of Gansey’s headrest so that her chin rested on the seat, Blue said, “We need to pick a movie. Noah gets two votes.”

“Why’s _he_ get two votes?” Ronan complained instantly. He chewed sullenly on the fraying leather cords about his wrist, worn from the frequent habit, a long-time one that he hadn’t bothered to try to break.

“Because he’s dead, and doesn’t have to pay,” Blue pointed out quite reasonably.

Noah preened.

“Parrish wants to see that chick flick,” Ronan said, just to be difficult. He turned the bracelets around and around his wrist. “You know, the one where the girls are all skinny and blonde and date hot rich guys. They’re just like him.”

Adam protested, “I do _not._ And I am _not._ ”

“Fine,” Gansey said, in the tone of one who was used to his two best friends arguing all the time. “Adam, Ronan, don’t start. Jane, Noah, that’s a good plan. Nino’s now, then a movie later.”

Gansey sighed. Ronan thought he was probably considering the fact that the expensive shirt he was wearing most likely cost more than any flick the dingy old movie theatre Henrietta, Virginia, had to offer. Like Ronan, Gansey had an abundance of money, but unlike Ronan, he looked it.

Blue was still on Gansey’s phone. “Ronan, unfortunately, none of the theatres around here allow carrion birds. So you’ll have to leave Chainsaw.”

Ronan rolled his eyes again, while Noah guffawed and reached out to tangle his fingers in Blue’s hair. She permitted him to pet the spikes, still looking down at Gansey’s phone.

“I don’t think they’ll let in ghosts either,” Ronan pointed out.

“Ronan, don’t be difficult,” Gansey said as they pulled into the parking lot of Nino’s.

Adam made a vaguely choked noise. “You wish!”

Ronan did his best to ignore them as they made their way into the tiny, shabby diner. He had resigned himself to spending the summer with them, looking for Glendower, but spending the summer doing typical activities—such as going to the movies or hanging out aimlessly in diners—didn’t fit with this group. It was as if Blue had been invited to Aglionby, or Adam wore a suit, or Chainsaw’s feathers turned orange.

Blue ordered pizza and tea for them, waving shyly to one of the waitresses, and they crammed themselves into a table in the back. Ronan ended up across from Gansey, with Blue and Noah on either side, which meant _cold_ on his left and _spiky_ on his right.

It could have been worse.

“Like I said,” Blue said, picking up the conversation as if it had never been interrupted, “there’s a showing of this movie at two, so we could go then. I mean, if that’s what we’ve decided to do.”

“What’s the movie?” asked Adam, toying with the straw in his iced tea.

Blue looked down at Gansey’s phone. “Oh, something full of violent special effects with magic and mystery and a stereotypical heteronormative romance. It sounds awful, really, but there’s nothing else showing, and it might be mildly interesting, or at least something to laugh about later.”

“We don’t have to go,” Noah pointed out, “although I’m kind of curious to see how that ends up.”

“We have to go, then,” Ronan said. “If Czerny wants to go, then we have to.”

“Wait, _no,_ ” Noah complained. “Don’t—”

“Czerny,” Ronan repeated, the unfamiliar name rolling off his tongue like water over a rocky riverbed. None of them were certain how to pronounce the word; Noah had never told them, and even for Ronan, asking seemed like a dick move.

“No,” Noah protested.

Ronan grinned. “Noah Czerny.”

“ _No,_ ” Noah said again. “Don’t call me that.”

“Ronan, don’t be an asshole,” Adam interrupted.

Ronan considered replying, but decided it wasn’t worth it.

Gansey tried to kick Adam under the table, but missed and hit Ronan instead, who hissed and kicked him firmly in the shin. Blue tried to push Ronan’s feet out of the way; Adam kicked Gansey in retribution for the intended action; Ronan calmly aimed his shoes at everything beneath the table besides Blue’s feet.

Once it had been relatively sorted out, Noah, who had been sitting quietly and watching, commented, “It’s really just a thing for real people, isn’t it, getting bruised.”

Noah had occasional bouts of melancholy, where everything would seem fine and then pow, all of a sudden he would say something that made Ronan feel like shit for being alive.

There was nothing any of them could do to make Noah’s death any easier; it still sucked.

Gansey cut Ronan off before Ronan could say anything about how he could probably give Noah a bruise if he tried hard enough, did Noah want to try it and see? “Noah, you’re as much of a real person as any of us.”

“Okay,” Noah said softly. He leaned into Blue’s shoulder, seeking her energy like a moth seeking a flame. “Okay.” He reached out for a slice of pizza, although he didn’t eat any, and toyed with the crust.

Ronan was suddenly furious. He wanted to break something. “Are we going to see this fucking movie or are we not?” he demanded, ignoring when Adam kicked him under the table, more accurately than Gansey had.

Gansey sighed and rubbed his thumb along his bottom lip, looking over at Blue. “Fine. We obviously won’t get anything accomplished here anyway.” He stood and fumbled in his wallet for money. “Jane, would you—?”

They finished and walked back out to the car, Noah skipping every few steps and running to catch up with Blue, Gansey striding along and laughing every time Blue and Noah shoved each other, Adam following dutifully behind them, hands in his pockets.

Ronan knew, then, that being average was just as overrated as anything else.

The way things were now might not have been good, but it was better, and that was enough.

 

Mid-morning arrived at the church before Ronan did, staining the walls in golden light. Adam was sitting out front, writing something in an old notebook with an older pencil. Ronan parked his BMW in the church parking lot and watched Adam for a moment. Gansey’s notebook containing all things Glendower was an old, leather-bound volume, carefully worn and lovingly used. Adam’s notebook, the one he was writing in, was beaten and ripped on the edges, clearly much used.

Adam looked up when Ronan walked over. “Hey, Ronan,” he said, closing his notebook. “What’s up?”

Ronan jerked his head in the direction of his still-idling car. “Let’s go, Parrish. You’re coming with me.”

Adam rubbed his eyes, looking exhausted, and smiled slightly. “Are you kidnapping me or something?”

“I wouldn’t ask if I was.”

“Oh, so you’re not a nice kidnapper?”

Ronan grinned. “You could say that.”

“Fine.” Adam stood up and tucked his notebook under his arm. “Where are we going?”

“To my place,” Ronan said over his shoulder. He opened the door for Adam, then went about to the driver’s side. The car purred as he pressed his foot against the pedal, and for a moment Ronan felt that old familiar rush of adrenaline that driving lent him. Then he remembered that Adam was there, and it didn’t count.

“Why? Did you figure something out?”

Ronan drummed his fingers on the steering wheel as he drove. “Not really, I just—couldn’t stand being around them any more. I need to just get away for a while.”

Adam frowned. “Yeah,” he said, and something in his voice sounded like longing, like he understood exactly what it was like to want to leave where you knew you belonged. “So go.”

Instead of answering, Ronan closed his eyes briefly, feeling coloured images dance behind his eyelids; discordant flashes of red and blue and black melded into a sea of swimming hues. When Ronan finally opened his eyes again, he pushed down on the pedal and drove towards the Barns.

 

The fields were overflowing with an abundance of flowers and trees and blossoms and fruits, wild and overgrown, blatantly surviving even after all the dreams that populated the place. Ronan parked next to the barn where he normally worked— _how screwed up,_ he thought suddenly, _that I think of it as work, when really it’s more home for me than anything else—_ and sighed.

“Home shit home. Ready, Parrish?”

Adam looked sourly at Ronan. “You’re one to talk.”

Ronan said, “I wasn’t fucking talking about your place.”

Adam closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat. To Ronan, he looked suddenly vulnerable, a teenager with dark smudges under his eyes and too much weight resting on the fragile bones of his shoulders. “Yeah, I know.”

“You can sleep for a while, if you want to,” Ronan offered, making up his mind in an instant of decision. Adam’s mouth turned down sharply. “This shithole isn’t going anywhere.”

But even as he said it, he wondered if he was wrong.

Probably not.

With what looked like a great deal of effort, Adam opened his eyes and looked blearily at Ronan, blinking repeatedly to keep his eyes open. “It’s just, I’ve been up all night helping Gansey with his Glendower stuff, so I . . .”

“No problem, man. You’re not the one who takes stuff from dreams. Knock yourself out,” Ronan said brusquely. “You want me to dream up a pillow or something? Sing you a lullaby?” Without waiting for an answer, he sang mockingly, “Squash one, sq—”

“Not _that song,_ ” Adam said unhappily. He nestled his head against the place where door met window and closed his eyes again. “If you don’t mind, I _am_ going to actually try—”

“Go ahead,” Ronan said, throwing his feet up on the dash with careless elegance. “I have to study for fucking _Latin_ anyway,” he said truthfully, reaching for his notebook and eventually pulling it from underneath the seat, much dog-eared and creased but otherwise none the worse for wear.

Adam huffed a brief laugh and was silent. His lashes brushed his pale cheeks like Chainsaw’s feathers. The sharp bones of his cheeks and jaw seemed gilded in the summery light. The shadows dappled his skin, turning him into a painting of a person, an impressionist blend of colours and shades.

Ronan realised he was staring and looked away.

 _Latin,_ he reminded himself, wishing suddenly for Chainsaw. _Latin. Study for Latin._

 

Ronan did not study for Latin.

To his credit, he did try. He tried for nearly fifteen minutes reviewing declensions before he gave up. Ronan couldn’t focus in the car when it wasn’t moving for the same reason that he couldn’t focus in school—he couldn’t stand being still for so long, trapped. Six hours behind a desk was barely endurable. Sitting in his car with a sleeping Adam Parrish at his family’s home was worse.

It was a trait which all the Lynches shared, that inability to occupy only one space comfortably. It was evident in their restless fingers, their shifting eyes, their rapid words. Niall Lynch had been that way as well, wild and exultant, driven by an insatiable need to build, to move, to create. Apart from his dreams, it was one of the ways in which Ronan was the most like his father.

Adam had fallen asleep with his cheek pressed against the window, and his breath formed a small smudge of condensation on the glass. His eyelashes brushed his skin. Watching him, Ronan wanted to break something.

He couldn’t stay in the car.

Taking care not to wake Adam (sneaking away did not good if you were caught), Ronan opened the door and closed it quietly behind him. His hand itched to slam the door shut, but if he was trying not to wake Adam, loud noises wouldn’t be much help.

Chainsaw would have been more help, because she could purposefully get in the way, and if Adam woke up then Ronan could blame it on her, but he’d left her at Monmouth and no matter how much he regretted the decision, well—

At least Noah didn’t often show up at the Barns.

It was difficult enough without a nosy, interfering ghost getting in the way all the damn time.

Ronan sat down a little ways away from the BMW and waited.

 

ADAM

Adam Parrish was not resentful.

He was not resentful of Gansey, of Gansey’s money and power and certainty in his quest to find the dead king Glendower; of Gansey’s relationship with Blue that they both tried to hide but that Adam, connoisseur of secrets, could see easily; of Gansey’s friendship with Ronan, the type of brotherhood where their words could cut rock and burned like broken glass.

He was not resentful of Blue Sargent, of Blue’s easy family where everyone had a place and everyone was loved; of Blue’s wild hair and effortless style that came not from having spent a ridiculous amount of money but having spent a ridiculous amount of time; of Blue’s simple addition into the group that had been Adam-Ronan-Gansey-Noah for so long.

He was not resentful of Ronan Lynch, of Ronan’s obvious belonging to his home, the Barns, even though it had held such pain for him; of Ronan’s shark-like smile and steely shell, unbreakable; of Ronan’s inexhaustible ability to keep fighting, no matter what happened, no matter the scabs on his knuckles and cuts on his face and blood in his mouth.

No, Adam Parrish was not resentful.

There were many things he did not resent, such as sacrificing himself to Cabeswater to wake the ley line. He was not resentful of being given a place in Aglionby, the high-end prep school that the rest of the raven boys went to. And he was not resentful of Ronan’s BMW, either, because it was a piece of shit.

Ronan’s had told him a thousand times that his car was wonderful, that it was a beautiful and glorious thing, and perhaps compared to Adam’s it was; besides, any car was better than Gansey’s ageless orange Camaro when it came to technicalities, but even Ronan couldn’t deny that there were some things lacking.

“It always feels like you’re going to be in some race or something when you drive this thing,” Adam said. He rubbed his eyes ponderingly. It was never pleasant to fall asleep in front of other people, even when those other people were Ronan or Gansey or even Blue, and somehow it was worse this time. “Like you can’t get wherever you’re going fast enough.”

Ronan said, “I can’t.”

“But you don’t race,” Adam said. His brain felt muddled, confused. Ronan hovered on the edge of racing, tense and readied, but never releasing the arrow from the bow. “Why? Is it because—because of Kavinsky?”

“ _Kavinsky,_ ” Ronan said bitterly, like the word was sour in his mouth. His face twisted and he looked away. “No, it’s not.”

“Then wh—”

“Don’t push it, Parrish,” Ronan warned, a thinly-veiled threat lurking behind the words. He got out of the car and slammed the door behind him, heading off across the field towards the barn where Adam knew he kept his dreamt objects.

Adam allowed himself a moment to dig his fingernails into his palms and clench his teeth. Every time he thought he was getting close to understanding something about Ronan, every time he thought that they might be on the verge of coming to terms, every time he thought maybe for once he could understand what it was all about—gone.

Again.

He got out of the car and followed Ronan.

Ronan was standing by the ancient door, the one that was mouldering and smelling earthy and living. His hand was splayed on the wood, ready to push it open. His knuckles were scabbed over, from what Adam didn’t know, but he could probably guess. “Well, Parrish? You coming with, or are you gonna wait this one out?”

The rebuke stung more than it should have, more than it would have, had it come from someone else. “I’m gonna come with,” Adam said, unconsciously letting his Henrietta accent take over the words. “I’m not stupid.”

“I never said you were,” Ronan muttered. He shoved open the door.

Adam had been in this particular barn several times before, but it always gave him a shock how full it was of _things._ There were all sorts of dreamt objects, some simple and useful and ordinary, and some wild and confusing and unique. There were paintings that seemed to watch him as he and Ronan stepped through the layers of dust. There were chairs with five legs and ornate panels. There were dust-covered and moth-eaten coats splattered with embroidered ravens. It was a madhouse of dreams.

Ronan started to pull out a chair, then changed his mind and sat gracelessly on the dirt floor, leaning against the wall. He managed to look insolently careless even while sitting down, a feat which Adam knew he was unable to match. “So.”

“So,” Adam agreed. To preserve what dignity he had left, he leaned cautiously against the wall. Splinters prickled against his neck and shoulders, sharp little thorny teeth. “Was there a point in coming here?”

“Getting the fuck away from Gansey and his bullshit plans,” Ronan said sharply. “I’m _so_ fucking sick of summer plans.”

At this, Adam almost laughed. It was exactly like Ronan, when all seemed to be going well and things were finally steadying out, to disappear to the vantage countryside because he couldn’t stand the monotony of making plans for the ordinary-as-possible summer. It made him a little less of an unattainable creature than before.

Adam couldn’t deny that he liked that very much.

“I keep having dreams,” Ronan said matter-of-factly. It was a simple thing to say, but Adam knew the confession belied mere simplicity: Ronan’s having dreams was nothing new; if he made a point to mention it, then it was something out of the ordinary. “It’s supposed to be over, all this shit, but I keep having dreams.”

Adam shoved his hands in his pockets and leaned against the splintering wood frame of the barn, blinking the sleep out of his eyes. “Nightmares?”

Ronan made a scoffing sound, as if to say _what else,_ and sat back against the wall with his legs outstretched in front of him in the dirt. “Kind of, yeah. The fun kind—you know, where your best friends get their throats ripped out by monsters, or by you, and you can’t tell the fucking difference.”

Adam didn’t know what to say. Ronan added, “You’re in the dreams.”

“ _Me?_ ”

It shouldn’t have been surprising, not really.

It still was.

“No, the other piece-of-shit raven boy who’s half tree and talks to ghosts,” Ronan said sarcastically. His words were sharp and brittle as frostbite. It took Adam a moment to realise that Ronan was afraid. “Yes, you, Parrish. Sometimes Gansey, but—mostly you.”

Adam asked, “Do I die?”

He didn’t know what made him say it; the expression Ronan wore confirmed it.

“Always.” Ronan’s hands formed fists. “I always dream about you fucking dying. Something goes wrong with Cabeswater, I dream up a fucking demon, Greenmantle decides to fuck me over—there’s always something.”

“What about the others?”

It was not what he wanted to say. It was not the right thing to say. Adam cursed himself mentally but carefully—there was no telling what could decide to come true, when Cabeswater would decide to listen. “What about Gansey? Blue?”

He didn’t mention Noah, because Noah was already dead.

Ronan’s sharply handsome face twisted. “Blue can take care of herself.”

Adam couldn’t argue with that: Blue was a thunderstorm, a hurricane, a firework, an explosion. She wouldn’t need Ronan’s dreams to save her, much less anything or anyone else. His mind flickered back to the slightly more personal issue. “Is there any . . . specific way . . . that I . . .”

He didn’t finish, but Ronan caught his meaning and turned his head away. “Mostly,” Ronan said, in the manner of someone who was trying very hard not to let themself break, “it’s me.”

Adam knew that voice. It was Gansey’s raven boy voice, it was Blue’s reasonable voice, it was his own voice. There was a moment where the only sounds were the soft noises of sleeping animals and Ronan scraping his fingernails urgently against the leather bracelets on his wrist.

“How do you know?” Adam asked finally. He was remotely surprised at how hollow his voice sounded, a reflection of how he felt. “That it’s a dream?” _That you have to kill me,_ he added to himself, but knew better than to say it aloud.

“I know when I’m awake or asleep, Parrish,” Ronan said, sounding almost insulted: there was a touch of amusement in his words, meant to cover up the fact that he wasn’t telling the entire truth. “I’m an asshole, not an idiot.”

There was some joke in there that could be made, Adam knew, but worry had snaked up his spine and refused to let him go. It was tinged with no small dose of curiosity. He slid down the wall until he was sitting on the ground facing Ronan, their shoes touching. Adam said, “How do you know _this_ isn’t a dream?”

For a single, terrible moment, Adam thought Ronan was going to say, _I don’t._ Then Ronan closed his eyes and said succinctly, “Pinch me.”

“What?”

“Pinch me,” Ronan repeated. His eyelids fluttered darkly, but his eyes remained tightly shut. “C’mon, Parrish. I’m not asking for much. Don’t be such a wimp.”

Adam hesitated.

“ _Do it,_ ” Ronan insisted.

Adam leaned forwards and put the tips of his fingers lightly on Ronan’s skin. He pinched the fleshy part of Ronan’s forearm between his thumb and index finger and squeezed, then let go. He kept his fingers resting on Ronan’s arm for a moment too long before pulling his hand away.

Ronan’s voice was low and dangerous, as riskily smoky as a devil’s. “That’s how I know that I’m not dreaming. That I’m awake,” he said. His eyes opened sharply and found Adam’s. “Happy now, Parrish?”

Adam tried and failed to swallow the lump in his throat. “But it . . . do you not feel it in the dream or something?” It didn’t seem like a very Ronan thing, but then again, few things did these days. _Maybe,_ Adam mused, _I’m not the only one who’s unknowable._

“No,” Ronan scoffed. “I can feel everything they do to me. It’s . . . in the dreams, you never do it. You _never fucking listen_ to me.” His eyes dropped to the barn floor, and he pressed the toe of his shoe against Adam’s.

“Oh.” The word sounded small and paltry. Not enough. _Just like me._ “What do I do, then?”

“Stand there,” Ronan said, his hands in fists and his jaw tight. He exhaled slowly and forced his fingers to relax and to open. “You stand there and you ask me if I want to wake up.”

The conversation was becoming more forbidden by the moment, a ship on a collision course with an iceberg, already used to sailing into uncharted waters since the first time it had ever been launched.

Adam twisted his fingers into the fraying cuff of his shirt. “And do you want to?”

Ronan hooked his foot over Adam’s ankle.

“Most of the time,” he said.

 

 

Adam was doing his Latin homework when the knock came on the door.

He didn’t immediately look up, lost in a tangle of nouns and declensions; it was probably that the sound had been a tree branch on the side of the building, a creaking floorboard in some other ancient room, a fragment of Cabeswater slipping from between his fingertips.

Then the sound came again, determined and insistent. Adam put his pencil on top of his open notebook and watched as it rolled off his book and onto the mattress before he got up and answered the door.

He didn’t need to look to know who it was: Ronan’s was a perceptible energy, something no one could ignore. He was a walking disaster waiting to happen, a storm masquerading as a raven boy. He was infinitely dangerous.

A rush of night air followed Ronan as he stepped into the apartment. He didn’t ask permission, and he didn’t need to; this had happened often enough and enough times that it was almost routine, a familiar pattern. Ronan ducked his head slightly as Adam shut the door behind him; he looked tousled and gratuitous, still wearing his Aglionby sweater, although it was wrinkled and dirty.

“I was doing homework,” Adam said. It was less of an accusation than it was a statement: _I had something. I have something. You are not my life, Ronan Lynch._

Ronan’s eyes skimmed the room, taking in the open notebooks and Latin textbooks on Adam’s worn mattress. “So studious of you, Parrish. _Et miseret me aliorum._ ”

“ _Te tolero,_ ” Adam pointed out flatly; _I put up with you._ “Where’s Chainsaw?”

It was slightly disorienting to see Ronan without his raven, like a part of him was missing. It was difficult to imagine what Ronan must have been like before Chainsaw, although Adam had known him then. He look unfamiliar without the feathered smudge clinging to his shoulder.

“Left her at Monmouth. Can I stay here?” asked Ronan. _Now_ he looked uncomfortable. “It’s, I just, I’m worried about—about dreaming about, about _wasps_ or something, with Gansey so—I don’t want—”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed. He took a step back to allow Ronan freer access to the tiny apartment. “It’s fine. There’s blankets and stuff like usual. I do have to finish my homework, though.”

“Latin?”

“ _Quid negoti tibi est?_ ”

Ronan grinned. “What do you think the odds are that our newest Latin teacher will turn out to be a murderous asshat who’s obsessed with dead Welsh kings by the end of the school year?”

“Better than the odds that you’ll make it past exams to see that happen,” Adam shot back. Ronan was good at Latin, if nothing else; the main difference between him and Adam in school was that Adam tried his hardest and Ronan didn’t try at all.

“Harsh, Parrish. Harsh,” Ronan said. His grin didn’t really fade, however. He walked over to Adam’s makeshift dresser and got out a couple of blankets and laid them on the floor, then sat cross-legged and pulled out the contents of his pockets. “I brought you rent.”

He handed Adam several small, brightly-wrapped chocolate bars. Adam said drily, “That’s a lot different from twenty-four hundred to cover tuition for the entire year.”

“I was a bit short on change.” Ronan leaned his elbows on his knees. The dark edges of his tattoo snaked out from the collar of his sweater. He looked dangerous, the sort of person you didn’t want to meet in a dark alley, raven boy or no. But he was still Ronan, first and foremost.

“I wasn’t sure what kind you liked,” Ronan said, gesturing towards the chocolate bars in Adam’s hands. “So I got you all of them—there’s plain chocolate, and caramel, and peanut—you’re not allergic to peanuts, are you? I can’t do CPR for shit, or whatever else you’d need.”

“Gansey’s the only one with a weird allergy,” Adam said. He carefully tore the wrapper from the first chocolate bar and took an experimental bite. “How _is_ Gansey, anyway?”

 _I need to get a cell phone,_ Adam thought. _It’s no use having to use Ronan’s or Gansey’s when they’re the ones I need to call._

“He’s great, man. As much as he ever is,” Ronan said. He played with the leather bracelets about his wrist. “He’s almost finished, again, with that fucking model of the entire goddamn town. He was working on it when I left—it was driving me batshit crazy.”

Adam was familiar with Gansey’s insomnia and what it caused him to do, although not as familiar as he was with Ronan’s. Gansey didn’t show up at his apartment at—Adam checked the clock—two-thirteen in the morning.

At least, not as often as Ronan did.

Ronan shifted slightly. “Want me to quiz you or something?”

It was a peculiarly touching offer, considering that Ronan had a tendency to fail every class except for Latin, primarily because he couldn’t be bothered to study—or, at least, to make lower than a B-average, which was the lowest acceptable average at Aglionby. “No, I think I’m going to actually do it later. Are you okay, sleeping on the floor?”

“You’re sleeping on the floor,” Ronan pointed out unhelpfully.

“I have a mattress. We could—”

“Don’t even try to start that shit,” Ronan interrupted, pointing at Adam. “You get the mattress, Parrish. Now go to fucking sleep. I’m fine as long as I’m not at Monmouth, so nothing happens to Gansey.”

Adam said, “What if something happens to me?”

“I don’t dream like that here,” Ronan said bluntly. “You’re here.”

_He means Cabeswater. It stops the dreams._

_Cabeswater. Not me._

“Okay,” Adam said finally. “Okay, then.”

“Sweet dreams,” Ronan said, in a mockingly nice voice, then lied down on the floor and flung his arm over his face. He let out his breath slowly, a long, drawn-out, exaggerated sigh, then was quiet.

Adam turned off the light and sat back down on the mattress. The moonlight puddled on the floor, silhouetting Ronan’s shoulders and back in silver. It took Adam a moment to realise he was lying on the dropped pencil.

He set it next to his bed, laid back down, and closed his eyes.

The whispers started almost at once, hissing tendrils penetrating the oppressive blackness. The night was a physical thing, not exactly malevolent, just endlessly, unreachably wary. Time was immeasurable, and there was no way Adam had of telling what amount of it had passed.

 _Cabeswater._ It was here, it was calling to him through the endless reaches of blackness, summoning him, speaking to him. Adam was not afraid of the dark; he was afraid of the things that lived in it. And, given some of the things that he had seen, whether they were monsters from Ronan’s dreams or not, he had very good reasons to be frightened.

 _In somno,_ the voices whispered. _Dormis. Somnis._

_Non modo nobis, sed etiam pro nobis. Numquam respice._

_Nunc expergefacis._

Adam woke up.

Moonlight still streamed through the grimy window onto the floor, spilling onto Adam’s hands when he sat up; the clock read four-thirty-three. His makeshift furniture cast peculiar shadows ripping through the silvery pools. The mattress springs squeaked melancholically.

Ronan was curled on the floor facing away from Adam, his hands tucked over his face. The light and shadows cast strange shapes feathering across his shoulders and back, and for a moment Adam thought something had happened. Then he realised that it was happening.

He wasn’t moving, but his breath came in hurried gasps, as if he were running; as Adam watched, Ronan muttered something in his sleep, barely audible: “ _Is est somnium. Is est somnium._ ”

_This is a dream. This is a dream._

Adam crawled over to Ronan and shook him gently, hands on his shoulders, then more insistently. “Hey. Lynch. Wake up. Wake _up,_ Ronan!”

Ronan’s eyes flashed open, quick as shifting gears, and Adam stumbled backwards on his knees. For a moment he saw no recognition on Ronan’s face, the way Persephone had looked while scrying, the way he had been told he had looked when—

“Adam? What the _fuck._ ”

Adam relaxed, breathless. He hadn’t realised how tense he’d been until he did. “Hey.”

“Hey,” Ronan replied, bemused. He pushed himself up, hissing slightly; the skin on his forearms was striated with thin red lines. As Adam sat there, watching, blood blossomed from the cuts and spread across Ronan’s skin. Ronan wiped his arms on his shirt, smearing the blood everywhere an making him look like the ghastly survivor of some horrible fight. “Oh, Jesus _fuck,_ ” Ronan said.

“Hold on,” Adam said, tearing his gaze away from the sight. He went quickly to the miniature bathroom and returned with a damp towel. He started to press it to Ronan’s arm, but Ronan sucked in his breath sharply and snatched the cloth away from Adam.

Adam sat back carefully on the mattress. “Thought you said you didn’t have those types of dreams here.”

“Yeah, so did I. Normally I don’t,” Ronan snapped. The towel was stained red from his blood. Adam thought they must hurt a lot, but if they did then Ronan wasn’t showing it. “Thanks for waking me up, I guess.”

“You _guess?_ Wow, I really feel appreciated,” Adam said. His pulse was pounding through his head; it was odd to feel something in both ears. He knew he was only angry because he had been frightened, but he couldn’t make himself remember that. “If it wasn’t for me, who _knows_ what would’ve happened—you could be _dead_ right now—”

_I could have lost him._

Ronan looked faintly annoyed. “I _said_ thank you. What more do you fucking want, Parrish? A thank-you card? A balloon? Save the princess from the big bad monsters?”

“I want you to not get hurt!”

“Well, think again. I’m not a genie with three wishes, baby.” Ronan’s face twisted. “I get hurt all the fucking time. It’s not your job to always take care of me like I’m some kid who has to be watched all the damn time so he doesn’t fucking burn himself.”

Adam raked his hands through his hair, pressing the heels of his palms into his eyes. _Don’t fight with Ronan. Don’t fight with Ronan._ It was a stupid command; everything was stupid. “I don’t want to have another argument,” Adam said. Maybe he only thought it. “It’s not a bad thing that I’m _worried_ about you, Ronan.”

Ronan opened his mouth to snap back with something else, and Adam braced himself, but then Ronan clenched his fists around the bloody towel and relaxed. “Fine. Worried about me. All right, I’ll remember that,” Ronan said drily, throwing the towel across the room. He collapsed back onto the floor. “Also I’m getting you a cell phone.”

Adam turned to stare at him, startled by the sudden shift in topic, but Ronan continued to lie on his back with his gaze directed at the place where the two walls sloped to meet the ceiling. “Why?”

“Because Gansey won’t shut up about it. Because we need to be able to find you if something happens. Because I might want to talk to you, asshole.” Ronan’s voice was carefully regulated, but Adam caught the deliberately casual tone and frowned.

“I don’t need your charity,” he began, but Ronan scoffed and tilted his head to roll his eyes at Adam.

“Charity? What do you think I am, the fucking Red Cross?”

Adam sighed, already forming a counterargument in his head, but before he could say anything else Ronan had closed his eyes again and buried his face in the crook of his elbow. Adam knew, then, that there would be no more conversation.

 

Although he slept lightly after that, Ronan was gone when he woke up the next morning. Adam left the apartment with no small amount of trepidation, furious at himself, furious at Ronan, furious at everything.

When he wearily climbed the stairs that night to his room and collapsed on him mattress, something crinkled. Slightly alarmed, Adam jumped back. A small box sat on his bed; written on the side, in Ronan’s hasty handwriting, were the words: _call me._

Adam sighed as he opened the box; he was only mildly concerned that Ronan had somehow managed to break into his apartment. As Ronan had promised, it was a cell phone, nestled in paper and tape. A sticker on the front proclaimed that the first two years of service had been paid for.

_I don’t want your charity._

_Charity? What do you think I am, the fucking Red Cross?_

Ronan’s number had been programmed into the phone as ‘not the red cross’.

Adam hesitated only a moment before texting him.

_you don’t need to keep buying me stuff, lynch_

_also i like the caramel_

 

GANSEY (interlude)

Gansey never knew exactly _why_ the refrigerator had been installed in the bathroom; it wasn’t for lack of space or available outlets elsewhere in Monmouth, that the kitchen and the bathroom had become one. Part of him suspected that it had been Ronan’s idea, as many of the more questionable ideas often were, but somewhere along the line, it had stuck.

He was in the kitchen/bathroom making breakfast (cereal) when his cell phone rang, a discordant chirping noise, from somewhere in one of the other rooms. After a brief war with the idea of bringing the cereal, Gansey clutched the bowl in one hand as he searched both vigorously and excitedly. The call was from a number he didn’t recognise. He held the phone to his ear and the cereal in his hand. “Richard Gansey speaking.”

“Seriously? Don’t use that voice on me. You know, your number is programmed into this thing as ‘the rich king-obsessed dick,’” Adam’s voice said matter-of-factly.

“ _Adam?_ ”

“Yeah,” Adam said. “No capitals, either, so I can’t tell if Ronan was trying to insult you or just piss you off.”

“Adam, why—”

“But knowing Ronan, probably both.”

“Adam—”

“It’s better than Blue’s, anyway—‘feminist lampshade’. I think that’s because of her dress?”

“Adam!” Gansey had finally lost enough patience to get to a point where he was vaguely snappish. “Is this your phone? When did you get a phone? Does this have something to do with Ronan? Do I need to warn you that it’s probably a supremely bad idea, whatever you’re planning on doing?”

There was a pause, which Gansey took to mean that _yes,_ Ronan had indeed been behind this, and _yes,_ whatever they were doing was a supremely bad idea, but also _no,_ Adam was not going to stop.

“I’m used to supremely bad ideas,” Adam said finally. “I spent all this time searching for a Welsh king who’s supposed to have been sleeping for six hundred years and who happened to be in Henrietta of all places because why the hell not. I was possessed by a magical forest, became friends with psychics, went into that raven cave thing, and all of out Latin teachers have been murderers. I think I’m good.”

“So it’s Ronan’s doing,” Gansey clarified. A small part of him was hurt that, after all the times he had offered to buy Adam a cell phone and Adam had refused, it had been Ronan who had gotten through to him in the end. But he quickly buried that small part as best he could.

Adam huffed a laugh. “Isn’t it always.”

Gansey set down the contents of his arms—milk carton, cereal bowl—and switched the phone to his left hand so that he could pour milk into his still-dry cereal with his right. The cereal had probably gone stale over a year ago, not to mention the milk. Gansey couldn’t remember the last time he had bought milk. It could probably kill him.

 _What an ignominious way to die,_ Gansey thought. _Poisoned by a bowl of cereal. I hope I have a slightly more interesting end than that._

Adam said, “Is Ronan—is he at Monmouth?”

“I think so,” Gansey said dubiously. Ronan had left at about two in the morning in a terrible mood and without saying a word. Gansey, holding a small cardboard model of Nino’s in his hand, watched him slam the door and drive away. As Ronan’s BMW melted into the shadows, Gansey had turned back to his project. The supposedly-super glue was determined not to stick, and the tape looked so unprofessional, in Gansey’s opinion. “I don’t remember hearing him come back, though. I assume you knew he left?”

“Uh, yeah—you could say that.” Adam hesitated. Gansey stirred his cereal absently with his finger; in his mad rush for his phone, he’d neglected to grab a spoon. “I just, I wanted to make sure he was okay.”

“Well, since I can text you now,” Gansey pointed out, “I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks,” Adam said, then hung up sans finesse.

Gansey regarded his spoon-less bowl of cereal with trepidation, carried milk, bowl, and box back to the kitchen/bathroom. He left the bowl of cereal on the sink, slightly disoriented by thinking of what to do. _Current list: Find a spoon. Put away milk. Locate Ronan._

There were tarnished silver spoons sitting in a mason jar on the sink, next to their toothbrushes. Gansey stirred the cereal with the spoon, wondering if it was safe to eat, wondering about Adam, then left his bowl on the sink. He put the milk back in the mini-fridge and went to find Ronan.

There was no response the first time Gansey knocked on Ronan’s door, but after straining his ears for a few minutes longer, Gansey could distinguish the faint rustlings of feathers and the muted bass of music. He knocked again, more insistently. This time there was a muffled caw, then Ronan’s voice hollerred: “It’s too early for this shit, Dick. Fuck off.”

“I’m going to come _in,_ ” Gansey said, “if you don’t come _out._ Open the door.”

Ronan opened the door.

He wore a black hoodie and a raptor’s smile, wicked and deadly. “What do I need to do to convince you that installing locks on certain doors in this shithole would be a good thing?”

“For starters,” Gansey said, although he knew Ronan hadn’t meant it literally, “you could not disappear at two in the morning and cause Adam to call me to ask where you were. Also, you could persuade me that you’re not holed up in there with alcohol or drugs or that terrible EDM you like to listen to—or you could not throw things out of the window. Stop letting that bird turn the place into a menagerie. Answer the phone when I call you. Act like a relatively civil human being. Try to—”

“Yeah, yeah, I get the point,” Ronan said. He still had his shark’s smile, all shining teeth and dangerous words. “Parrish called?”

From somewhere inside Ronan’s room, Chainsaw let out a plaintive cry. Ronan shushed her.

“Just a minute ago,” Gansey said. What Ronan had said had reminded him that he needed to text Adam. Raising his eyebrows at Ronan, Gansey sent Adam a brief message ( _Ronan’s here. It’s fine_ ) and put his phone away. “Jane and I were planning to—”

“No,” Ronan interrupted.

Gansey sighed. “You could—”

“No.”

Are you s—”

“No.”

“Even if I—”

“ _No._ ”

“Fine,” Gansey said, his thumb automatically finding his bottom lip. “I’ll be at 300 Fox Way if you need to find me. Or you could just text me, for the love of God. It won’t kill you.”

“Probably not,” Ronan agreed, and shut the door in Gansey’s face.

 

ADAM

“I’m sick of all this waiting about,” Ronan said. “I want to feel like we’re doing something.”

The persistent afternoon sun spilled over the Barns, staining the fields and house in gold. Everything was alive with the hum of summer, the fields and buildings and insects that buzzed about their faces. There were trees, too, but they were all silent here. Adam could understand why, to Ronan, it was a refuge.

Adam said, “We went to see a movie last week.”

If the Barns was a refuge, it was Ronan’s refuge. Each time they drove to the secluded farm, Ronan changed perceptively. His posture relaxed, his fists unclenched, and something about his eyes softened. It was the same sort of look he had when around Matthew or Chainsaw, the look that showed how much Ronan really did care about certain things, the look that made Adam’s heart do complicated things.

“I know. It sucked. Blue’s taste in movies is terrible. You would think at least Gansey would have better taste,” Ronan said. Adam knew he meant the movie, not Blue herself, but something about it still irritated him.

“What do you have against Blue?”

“Nothing,” Ronan said, bemused. “Other than the fact that I feel bad for her. Her house is fucking creepy. But I don’t dislike her.”

Adam felt bad for Blue with half of his heart. The other half, the selfish, bitter half, was foolishly glad that if Blue wouldn’t (or couldn’t) kiss him, then she couldn’t (or wouldn’t) kiss Gansey either. Adam knew there was no reason good enough for him to justify how he felt, but he couldn’t (or wouldn’t) stop feeling it.

“Also she likes yoghurt too much,” Ronan said pensively. “And Gansey.”

“You don’t see the appeal?”

“The yoghurt, or Gansey?”

“Take your pick.”

Ronan scoffed and leaned back against the wall; they were in the barn full of dreams again, although there had been no progress made in waking any of the animals. Adam didn’t think that Ronan’s intention was to wake them this time. “I mean that we’re not doing anything real. Productive, that sort of shit. You know what I mean, Parrish.”

“Yeah,” Adam agreed. He scuffed his shoes in the dirt.

Ronan nudged Adam’s shoe with his own. “What about you, Magician? Had any new ideas recently?”

Adam pushed Ronan’s shoe away. “No. Not really,” he admitted. The summer had a particularly sleepy, languid quality which it bestowed upon any and all of them. It was impossible to get things done. “Why? Do you have any ideas on what I should be doing?”

Ronan smirked, and Adam felt his face grow warm. But Ronan only said, “Something useful. We ought to be doing something useful.”

“Maybe we could go to Blue’s house and help there.”

“Dream on.”

Despite himself, Adam laughed breathily. “Oh, stop it.”

“Stop what? Dreaming?”

“No, that’s not what I . . . meant.”

What Adam meant was that, despite all of the disagreeable qualities about Ronan Lynch, Adam was finding it increasingly difficult to deny that there was quite a lot about Ronan that he liked. Ronan was a dreamer who devoured his dreams, a fighter who couldn’t stay down, a soldier in a war where the enemy was everybody else.

And Adam couldn’t deny that he was starting to like this very much.

Ronan looked at Adam, then at the sleeping creatures sprawled about them. They had done their best to move the cows into more comfortable positions to sleep, several weeks ago. It had been Ronan’s idea, one kindness in a string of such that were beginning to surprise Adam less and less.

“They don’t eat,” Ronan said suddenly, careening wildly off topic. “Even Chainsaw has to eat. They should be dead by now if they don’t fucking eat.”

Adam shrugged; he was far from expert in the mechanics of dream things. “Maybe they were dreamed that way. Not needing to eat, I mean. I don’t know. Did you dream Chainsaw like that?”

Ronan scoffed. “I don’t remember a damn thing. When I dreamt Chainsaw I was fucking drunk. I dreamt a goddamn raven, and that’s what I got. Not this shit.” His lip curled slightly. “I think.”

“But Chainsaw’s like a normal bird? She’s a dream, but she acts like a normal bird.” Adam had never understood how dream creatures worked. They were fascinating but impossible, just like their makers. “And so is your—”

Ronan looked away.

 _Stupid, stupid,_ Adam berated himself. _Stupid._

“Yeah,” Ronan said eventually. “As far as anyone’s concerned, they’re pretty damn real.”

A sharp block of sunlight covered Ronan’s face and lit the lines of his jaw and curves of his cheekbones. He was all sharp corners, but at the Barns, he softened about the edges.

It was difficult, sometimes, to reconcile this Ronan with the one he was in public.

“Do you have any idea what time it is?”

_Smooth, Parrish._

Ronan checked an invisible watch. “Half past shit o’clock.”

“You _have_ a phone.”

“So I do, Parrish.” His smile was maddening. “So do you.”

“Why,” Adam began, then stopped. He wasn’t sure how to say what needed to be said.

Adam liked to think that he was getting better at accepting help from others, but it was still difficult not to refuse when Ronan offered to pay for meals or when Gansey offered to take him shopping or when even Blue offered to lend him some of her paltry earnings.

“It’s just us trying to help,” Blue had pointed out. “It’s a friends thing. Friends buy each other food and clothes and books. It isn’t as if we’re trying to buy you off or anything.”

“A friends thing,” Adam had echoed. “You know I can’t pay you guys back.”

Which was why he couldn’t accept their help. Maybe friends did buy each other food and clothes and books, but if Adam couldn’t buy food and clothes and books in reciprocation, then it couldn’t go the other way.

 _Eventually,_ he thought. Eventually he wouldn’t have to worry about it any more.

“Why . . .”

“Why what?”

“Why did you buy me a cell phone?”

Ronan said scathingly, “Do you not like the colour?”

“No, I—the colour’s fine, it—what I meant is why do you keep doing nice things for me,” Adam finished in a rush. “The rent. The stuff for my hands. The phone. The—the—the chocolate bars, and—”

“I’m just being nice.” Although the words were sarcastic, Ronan’s expression was a cross between confused and annoyed, a yin and yang of emotion. “Do you want me to stop?”

_Yes._

_No._

“I don’t know,” Adam said. He rubbed his shoe in the dirt. “I don’t know anything any more, not really. I was kind of hoping you could tell me, actually.”

Ronan said, “I’m not the one who’s a magician.”

He kicked Adam’s shoe again, but this time Adam didn’t respond.

Sunlight spiderwebbed across Ronan’s bare arms and face, shading his skin golden.

Adam leaned his shoulders against the rough wood wall and turned his head to look at Ronan. His breath hitched in his throat. His heart was pounding a wild beat in his chest, and he was suddenly hyper-aware of the sharp contours of Ronan’s cheekbones, the shadowed hollows of his collarbone, the way his lashes brushed his cheeks.

 _I’ve changed my mind,_ Adam thought desperately. _I have ideas about what we could do, right now, and they’re either running as fast as I can away from here, or the exact opposite._

Everything seemed to hang, waiting.

Then Ronan shifted slightly away, and the spell was broken.

Adam scrambled to his feet, shuddering indecisively between relief and disappointment. “We, um. We should go back. Before Gansey gets worried. You saw how he was when Blue disappeared.”

“Fine,” Ronan said. Everything about him was sharpening, melting back into the dangerous, unpredictable person he was the majority of the time. “I’ll drive you back. But I get to pick the music.”

He offered his hand to Adam, and Adam helped pull him to his feet. Ronan grinned. It was his sharp, fanged smile, that of a snake about to strike. Adam couldn’t reconcile him. The fangs got in the way of anything he’d wanted to do.

“Thanks a million, Parrish,” Ronan said, and kicked open the door to the barn.

Adam followed, simmering.

Everything was his fault.

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations of the boys’ Latin for those not adept in a long-dead language:
> 
> Et miseret me aliorum (And I feel bad for the others.)  
> Te tolero (I put up with you.)  
> Quid negoti tibi est? (What business of your is it?)  
> In somno. Dormis. Somnis. ([You are] in a dream. Sleep. Dream.)  
> Non modo nobis, sed etiam pro nobis. Numquam respice. (Not only to us, but also for us.)  
> Nunc expergefacis. (Now wake up.)  
> Is est somnium . (This is a dream.)


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noah meddles. Blue complains. Gansey stresses. Adam worries. Ronan argues. Orla gets in the way. The usual.

RONAN

Noah showed up when Ronan was sprawled on his bed, trying to persuade Chainsaw to give back one of his shoelaces.

“Why aren’t you at Nino’s with Blue?” asked Noah. He slouched against the wall.

Ronan gave him a look that clearly demonstrated his incredulity at the fact that Noah could think he, of all people, would willingly subject himself to spending time pursuing such mundane things as the summer plans Gansey and Blue had orchestrated.

Noah grinned widely. “They got pizza.”

“Why aren’t _you_ there?”

“I don’t eat pizza,” Noah said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Ronan scoffed. “Poor taste, then.”

“I don’t _taste._ ”

“Still.”

“You should probably do whatever they’re doing. Even if you don’t want to,” Noah pointed out. “Friends are supposed to do stuff together.”

“We do stuff together.”

“Frame your Latin teacher for murder? Very romantic.”

“Since when is this about Parrish?”

Noah grinned, simultaneously taking on the countenance of a twelve-year-old and the countenance of someone much older than he appeared to be. His tone was light, but belied his meaning. “Since when is it not?”

“I’ll call an exorcist,” Ronan threatened.

“Rude.”

Chainsaw pecked absently at the floor, then flew to the top of the dresser. Ronan contemplated calling her over, but decided against it. He glowered at Noah, and wondered if throwing him out a window again would be a bad idea.

“I don’t think you’re gonna die because you go to a movie with your friends,” Noah said.

“I don’t think I’m gonna die because I go to a haunted forest to talk to a magic line with my friends,” Ronan retorted. Noah flinched, but didn’t look away. “Stay out of my business.”

“Rude,” Noah commented, and vanished.

Chainsaw walked towards the edge of the dresser and dropped a quarter off the side. It made a hollow clang when it hit the wood floor, and rolled away underneath the dresser itself. “ _Kerah?_ ”

“Yeah, whatever,” Ronan said to the empty air.

He was getting sick of waiting about.

_What’s the most unpredictable thing I could do? Find something, then do it. Don’t just sit about waiting for something to happen._

 

Blue did not pick up the phone.

Ronan had been betting on her or Calla, both of whom would be more pleasurable to talk to than _certain other people,_ despite Calla’s determined disapproval of him and Blue’s determined approval, both of which Ronan believed to be equally foolish.

“Psychic hotline, how may I help you today?”

“Orla,” Ronan said, the same way he might have said _dead body_ or _dog shit_ or _homework._

If any of those unsavoury nouns were dark-skinned and flirtatious, that is, although Ronan would have been mildly concerned if his Latin verb study sheets tried to hit on him.

Everything was Adam’s fault.

“Oh. You’ll want Blue, I suppose? Which one are you again? The pretty one?”

“No, the snake.”

“Oh.” It was a very different type of _oh,_ a lush sort of exhale. Orla giggled. “ _Oh,_ indeed. _BLUE!_ ” This last was directed only slightly away from the phone, a full-bodied ebullient shout, and Ronan jerked the phone away from his ear. “ _SOMEONE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU!_ ”

From somewhere else in the house, Blue hollerred back, “ _WHO IS IT?_ ”

“ _ONE OF YOUR RAVEN BOYS! IT’S NOT MY JOB TO KEEP TRACK OF YOUR FRIENDS, BLUE SARGENT. GET THE DAMN PHONE._ ”

There was a tremendous crashing noise, then Blue’s voice in much closer proximity: “ _Give me the phone, Orla._ Let me talk to him! Is it Gansey? Stop that, you—Orla, give me the—go _away!_ ”

Ronan waited, chewing on his bracelets, and considered that Gansey had peculiar taste indeed. Owen Glendower, Blue Sargent. Both impossibilities, both real. But then, that was Gansey: lover of the strange and improbably alluring.

“Hello? Are you Adam?”

“No, I’m not. Although I’m trying awfully hard,” Ronan said, rolling his eyes up at the sloped ceiling of Monmouth Manufacturing. “I’ve got myself a Coca-Cola shirt, and I’m growing my hair out, and—”

“You’ll have to dye it blond. Wait, you have a Coca-Cola shirt?”

“They’re not _that_ unusual, Sargent.” As a matter of fact, the shirt had been another dream object, resembling Adam’s nearly perfectly, but Ronan wasn’t about to go into detail with _Blue,_ of all people, who had been Adam’s girlfriend.

“Mhm. I bet. Was there a reason to call me?”

Ronan chewed pensively on his bracelets. “Your boyfriend is a monomaniac.”

“Fits right in, then.”

“I, for one,” Ronan said coolly, “have far more than a singular interest in a singular damn thing.”

Blue’s laugh was tinny and chipped over the phone, a muted _hah._ “You were almost nice, Lynch. Almost. That’ll be the day, huh. What did Gansey do this time?”

“What he always does. You guys are back from Nino’s, I take it?”

“You take it correctly.” Blue sounded pleased. “Noah showed up, by the way.”

All the humour in the conversation left in a sickening swoop.

Ronan clenched his fingers around the phone. “What did Caspar want, this time?”

“Ha, ha. Funny. Not pizza. He was worried about you.”

Ronan did his best to convey every bit of garish resentment as possible into a single scoffing noise.

Blue sighed. “Don’t be like that. It’s just hanging out.”

“Summer plans. You sound like you’re twelve. Or eighty.”

“So, how Gansey sounds all the time?”

“Pretty much,” Ronan admitted. Blue was an exceptional verbal sparring partner, and it was always enjoyable to shoot words back and forth with her. “I’m not gonna go to a fucking movie if I don’t want to even go. It’s not my _job_ to hang out with you guys.”

“I do think you’re overstepping this, but I agree with you,” Blue said. “Will you go to a movie with us if it isn’t conventionally stereotypical and the plot isn’t as old as Gansey’s kings?”

“Are you asking me out, Sargent?”

Blue snorted impressively. “You wish. _Orla, get out of here!_ ” The second part of her statement was hissed vehemently, and static surrounded her words in a high-pitched crackle of noise.

“Maybe,” Ronan said. “If you actually pick something that isn’t shit.”

“I picked Gansey.”

“Parrish isn’t shit.”

“I never said that.”

“Good.”

Blue laughed. “Okay,” she said. “Cool. I’ll steal Gansey’s phone and browse for new movies. If I can get something good enough, I’ll hold you to your word. Was that everything you wanted to say?”

Ronan shrugged, even though she couldn’t see him. “Yeah. Guess so.”

“Okay. Bye.”

“Don’t get all sentimental on me, maggot,” Ronan said drily.

Blue laughed again and hung up.

 

ADAM

Adam finally worked up the nerve to talk to Gansey about Blue a week later.

It was pouring rain, rain which soaked the ground into pools of sticky, oozing mud and slashed windows with streaks of heavy downpour. The storm surrounded the tiny town of Henrietta, covered her in its clouds, and proceeded to dump buckets on her. The roads were flooded, 300 Fox Way creaked and groaned with the water emptying from the gutters on the roof, and Monmouth Manufacturing smelled of mould and rain.

Adam, along with Blue herself, had been invited to Monmouth as an evasion tactic: Calla’s generally-terrible mood only worsened in the rain, and Blue, dripping and miserable, had showed up at the old, defunct factory in a long red raincoat and ridiculous rubber boots, clutching the handle of a frog umbrella that had either seen better days or had been doomed from birth. For Adam’s part, he had been drowsing in the tiny apartment above St Agnes, lulled by the methodical thrum of the rain drumming on the slanted roof, when Ronan had slammed on the door and demanded that Adam come to Monmouth before the fucking storm blew the roof off and Gansey lost his shit.

It was, considering Ronan, a very persuasive argument.

Noah hadn’t been more than an insubstantial haze—something about the rain messed with the ley line, and therefore his corporeality—but soon after arriving, Ronan and Blue had disappeared to a different room, most likely for nefarious purposes, leaving Adam with Gansey.

Gansey had been working on his model of Henrietta, but had abandoned it in favour of poring over his fat-spined leather journal containing all things Glendower. He was writing notes in the margins in a tight, cramped hand, muttering to himself. Occasionally he would look up, rub his thumb along his lower lip, and murmur, “No, not that,” then return to his task.

Adam hated to interrupt him—there was something magical about watching Gansey work—but sacrifices were, after all, his speciality.

He knelt next to Gansey, on the fringe of the cardboard Henrietta.

“Gansey?”

“Mhm?”

Gansey looked up, eyes wide and startlingly innocent. This was the side of Gansey, Adam mused, that most people couldn’t see—the innocently-curious, almost childlike explorer, fascinated with the world about him. He seemed so real, so unable to die, so improbably living.

Adam tangled his fingers in the frayed cuff of his shirt sleeve. He didn’t know how to finish conversations, much less to start them. “I was wondering . . . um.”

Gansey closed his journal with the air of one patting a loved child on the head before sending it off to bed; Adam caught a hasty glimpse of a map marked with many red pinpricks and lines. “Yes?”

Adam tugged viciously at a loose thread. “About . . . about, about Blue. I know you’re trying to not hurt my feelings by pretending you’re not . . . ,” _come on, Adam,_ “together, or whatever you’re calling it. But. You don’t have to.”

He didn’t say, _You’re going to die soon enough, so it doesn’t matter._

He didn’t say, _I don’t resent what it is you have in this way, not any more._

He didn’t say, _I only want us to not fight._

Gansey frowned and rubbed his thumb on his bottom lip. “Adam, I—”

“I know what you were thinking,” Adam continued recklessly. “Don’t pretend that isn’t what you were doing. But you don’t have to. It’s not a problem any more. I’m mostly worried about Blue. I mean, worried about what she would think. About me. Thinking about this. If that makes any sense.”

“Oh, you don’t have to worry about Jane,” Gansey said. “And I can take care of myself. I think what you should be worrying about you and Ronan instead. Have you figured out exactly what you’re doing yet?”

He said _you and Ronan_ as if it were a material object, something that could be dusted off and put on a shelf.

“No. No, we haven’t. I don’t think we ever will,” Adam admitted. It was only slightly embarrassing that Gansey had noticed; only slightly incriminating that he didn’t deny it. He didn’t want to talk about Ronan. He didn’t really even want to talk about Blue. Things that needed to be said were rarely the things he wanted to be said. “That’s not how it works.”

Gansey shrugged carelessly. “I wouldn’t bother you about it.”

“It’s just, it would be kind of weird,” Adam burst out. “Trying to date Blue, I mean. Because she’s one of us now. I guess I know it wouldn’t have worked. Not for me. So I guess what I’m trying to say is I don’t mind.”

“Oh,” Gansey said, a very different _oh_ from before. “Oh. Well. Thank you. I was worried for a while, about how you would take it.”

“I know,” Adam said. He felt raw, kinetic, uncontrollable. “It doesn’t bother me.”

This was where the clichés came in: _I just want her to be happy._

_I just want to be happy._

_I just want to know what being happy feels like._

“Oh,” Gansey said, for a fourth time.

“Blue would kill us if she knew we were having this conversation,” Adam said unhappily, realising that it was probably true. “She would actually honestly kill us if she knew. She hates being treated like a thing we can fight over.”

“Anyone would. And I don’t doubt her ability to injure us both,” Gansey pointed out. “She somehow acquired a switch-blade, and while I have no doubt she would probably use it mostly to rip up her shirts, she can be extremely intimidating.”

Adam paused for a moment, imagining Blue with a switch-blade in her hand and look of righteous anger on her face.

It was a terrifying yet endearing image.

“Well,” he said, tugging at his sleeve again, “I’m gonna go with a stupid ending and say I’m glad we had this talk, okay?”

Gansey raised his eyebrows slightly, and said, “I think that’s my line.”

Adam started to say something else, but was interrupted by the startlingly loud sound of a door slamming against a wall. A moment later, Blue’s and Ronan’s voices carried up the stairs.

“I’m not going to conform to your socialistic gender stereotypes just because it’s how you think feminism ought to be!”

“Well, maybe you should detail this shit to my face, then!”

“Yeah, maybe I should! It’s sexist, assuming because I’m a feminist, because I’m a _girl,_ that therefore I have to act certain ways to maintain my feminism!”

“Jesus _shit,_ maggot. Calm down. All I said was—”

“I don’t do certain things because I’m a feminist, I do them because I like how they make me feel and that’s all that matters!”

“Fucking hell, maggot, I told you your dress looked like it had been run over by the spawn of when a lamp fucked a lawnmower. It’s not the end of the world.”

“That’s not even anatomically possible!”

Gansey flinched. “I think,” he said purposefully, “that we should either vacate the premises and brave the storm outside, or brave the storm inside.”

“Hey, she’s _your_ girlfriend.”

And it felt so relieving to say, to admit it: Blue and Gansey, Blue as Gansey’s girlfriend, not Adam’s, to say, finally, what he knew had been coming. A small part of Adam burned with jealousy, but the amount of rain the sky had loosed upon the world had smothered most of the fire.

_I just want her to be happy._

Blue stormed into the room, a thunderstorm of fury. “Adam! Tell this—this—” Adam thought she might actually swear, but she lost her nerve and continued, “tell _him_ to get some better opinions.”

Ronan had no such qualms regarding swearing. “Tell Parrish to stay the fuck out of my business. I said your dress was fucking weird, Sargent, don’t act like I accused you of communism or some shit like that.”

“I think I’ll stay out of this one, actually,” Adam said quickly.

“Smart move,” Blue fumed, glowering. “I’m gonna go get something to eat. Don’t kill Gansey while I’m gone.”

“Very funny,” Gansey called after her. “But I’m not planning on dying any time soon, Jane.”

Adam flinched.

_We can’t tell him._

Ronan flung himself onto the couch. “I fucking hate the rain.”

“Want to go to Nino’s?”

“Is that your solution for everything, Dick? On the hunt for a Welsh king, let’s go to Nino’s! Our other friend’s been dead for seven years, let’s go to Nino’s! Your girlfriend’s a lampshade, let’s go to Nino’s! Parrish gets the shit beat out of him, let’s go to Nino’s! Our Latin teacher is a murderous douchebag, let’s go to—”

Blue breezed back in, holding a cup of yoghurt in one hand and a spoon in the other. “Your bathroom-kitchen-thing is super dirty. Do you ever wash dishes?”

Gansey looked up again in surprise. “Do you keep yoghurt at Monmouth?”

“I have a couple stored in your fridge. I think it would not be a good idea to let Jimi in here. She would hate the mess,” Blue said nonchalantly, perching next to Ronan on the couch, all elements of their earlier argument forgotten. “Also you have six half-empty loaves of bread. Do you _ever_ clean?”

“I don’t know if that’s safe to eat, if you got it from the fridge,” Adam warned her. “They haven’t cleaned that thing, ever.”

“It was not my idea,” Ronan said to no one in particular.

“I’m busy,” Gansey said, looking up with a long-suffering air. “I don’t have time to wash dishes. Maybe I could hire someone. Jane, you’re a waitress, could I hire you to help, maybe?”

“We _talked_ about this,” Blue said petulantly. “First time we met. Remember? Almost a _year_ ago.”

“And you wonder why I won’t move in here,” Adam said.

 

The rain ceased as abruptly as it had begun, and Gansey did, in fact, manage to convince them all to pile into the Pig to drive over to Nino’s.

Something about the aftermath of the heavy rainstorm had left Adam feeling drained, as if the storm had scraped out the inside of his ribcage and left him hollow and empty, exhausted and weary and beaten.

The tiny apartment above the church smelled irrevocably of mould. Despite Adam’s protestations, Gansey, having happily texted Adam a request that came across as a command, allowed Adam to sleep at Monmouth. The old warehouse didn’t smell better, but it was comfortable, and even if Adam wouldn’t sleep in Noah’s room (“You don’t have to sleep on the couch!” “No, Gansey, I think he really does.” “Ronan, not helping.” “Quiet, Sargent.” “I can sleep on the couch, really. I don’t mind.” “Well, if you’re certain . . .”) it was still a relief.

Adam managed to wrap himself in a worn blanket similar to the ones he kept in his makeshift dresser, except noticeably more expensive, before he fell asleep on the couch, sprawled on the tattered cushions.

For a moment he thought he could hear a voice murmuring in his ear, _illud haud sciam,_ but then it was gone and he was asleep.

When Adam woke up later, the sunlight was streaming through the wide windows and spilling onto his face. Adam rubbed his eyes, still tired, but unwilling to be any more of a burden than he already was.

“You’re not a problem to them, you know.”

Noah’s ghostly form did little to block the sun, but had the added effect of converting the light into something wavy and distorted with the appearance of being underwater. Adam groaned and covered his eyes with his hands.

“Where is everyone, Noah?”

“In Gansey’s room. Gansey’s doing that thing where he acts like he’s someone’s dad. Ronan’s trying to teach Chainsaw how to do tricks. Blue’s turning the wall into a mural. Fun stuff.”

Adam sat up wearily. “How long was I sleeping?”

“Almost a day. Gansey said he thought it was the storm. He thought the ley line must’ve been disturbed or something, so Cabeswater needed to pull energy from you. I wasn’t feeling super great either, but now I’m okay.”

“I’m glad you’re okay.” There were times when Noah reminded Adam of a small puppy. Now was one of them. He got up and folded the blanket as neatly as possible. “Are they planning to go to Nino’s later?”

“Probably,” Noah said carelessly. “But Gansey won’t let me buy those cool snow globes and I’m mad at him, so I probably won’t go.”

Adam raised his eyebrows.

“Okay, I mean he won’t buy them for me,” Noah amended. “I don’t have any money.”

“Were you rich, too, Noah?” asked Adam as the two of them walked through the sunlit building towards the room where voices could be heard.

Noah scrunched up his nose. “Um. I think so? I had a super cool car.”

Adam remembered the rusting Mustang they had found in the ageless forest. “Yeah.”

Blue hurtled out of Gansey’s room and crashed into Adam’s chest. Disentangling herself, she looked up at him and rubbed her nose punitively, something only Blue Sargent could accomplish. “Oh, Adam. Hi. We’re going to Nino’s. I didn’t think you were awake.”

“Going without him? Rude,” Noah commented.

Adam did his best not to think about Noah’s opinion. Ronan had just walked out behind Blue, his hands shoved into his pockets, and leaned discrepantly against the door frame. “Um, I’ll come with you guys.”

“Me too,” Noah interrupted, not to be outdone. “I’m not mad any more.”

“Thank God, last time you were in a pissy mood you made all the lights go to shit,” Ronan said, stepping around Blue and manoeuvring towards the door. “Gansey’s getting ready. He’ll be out in a minute.”

“I’m here,” Gansey said, his voice muffled.

“I call shotgun!” Blue yelped.

“Screw you,” Ronan grumbled.

Adam leaned his head against the wall and wished for more sleep.

 

“I actually think that would be a terrible idea,” Blue was saying around a mouthful of pizza crust and garlic sauce. “Actually, truly, completely, wholly terrible.”

“It would be fun.”

“No, it most certainly would not be fun,” Gansey said firmly. “I would rather prefer us to not die before we finish high school, or after, for that matter.”

Ronan smirked and hooked his ankle over Adam’s underneath the table. “You never want to have any fun, old man.”

Adam could feel his pulse quickening, and avoided a meaningful look from Noah as he looked down at his hands, clenched around each other in his lap. He hadn’t been focusing on their conversation, and had missed the first part of it, but he was too tired to contemplate talking.

Gansey said, “I fail to see how risking serious injury and possible hospitalisation falls under the category of what is generally considered ‘fun’ in my vernacular.”

“I don’t have a fucking clue what that means.”

“ _Ronan._ ”

Adam wasn’t sure when it had happened, this larceny of his heart.

“I think it could be fun,” Noah chipped in. He was making the salt shaker chase the pepper shaker around and around the table. A yin-yang of seasonings. “I could drive.”

“That,” Blue said, “is an even worse idea. Which is saying something.”

“Oh, come on,” Ronan said, grinning. He rubbed his ankle along Adam’s leg. “Gansey can drive, if it makes you feel better. He’s a prodigy.”

Gansey looked only vaguely offended. “Not really,” he said. He looked at Blue. Blue looked back.

Adam couldn’t decide if he wanted to ignore Ronan or not. He settled for not moving and acting as if he were extremely interested in the logo printed on the paper napkins.

“It’s still a terrible idea.”

“Don’t be like that, maggot. It’s fun. Parrish agrees with me, don’t you, Parrish?”

Startled, Adam looked up from the napkin. “Huh?”

“Ronan suggested that we attach some sort of thing to the back of his car and drive about with someone riding on the back of it,” Blue said in a way which conveyed clearly that she disapproved.

“Oh,” Adam said. “That. It can be kind of fun, sometimes.”

And resulted in gashes and cuts on his arms and legs, he added silently, but road burn was a small price to pay, scrapes and scabs or no.

Ronan pounded his fists on the table triumphantly, knocking over Noah’s salt- and pepper-shaker collection. “What did I _tell_ you, man. Come on! It’s not like you have other plans or anything.”

“If you and Adam want to do that, then by all means go ahead. But I will not participate,” Gansey said.

“Me and Adam do want to do that,” Ronan replied.

“I’ll participate,” Noah added gleefully.

Blue rolled her eyes so hard that Adam could feel her disapproval. “Fine. Get yourselves killed. Have fun with that.”

Ronan nudged Adam’s leg under the table again. “Oh, we most certainly will.”

Noah clapped excitedly and knocked over his newly-re-established tower of spices. “Oh, _no._ ”

Adam wasn’t sure how much he could take.

“Noah,” Blue complained.

“Sorry, I know,” Noah said, replacing the spices carefully on the table. “So are we doing the plan? Because I’m super excited.”

It was easier, somehow, for Adam to admit it to himself when he was with them.

_I have a crush on Ronan Lynch._

“Noah,” Blue admonished. “I can’t stop you from being involved in this, and since you’re already dead I don’t think it matters as much for you as it matters for them, but I will say that the whole lot of you have super weird ideas of fun.”

“I have no idea,” Ronan said, deadpan, “what you are talking about.”

“Cars! What is it about cars and masculinity? I don’t understand it!”

“Hey now,” Ronan warned. “Don’t disrespect the Pig. It’s shit, but in a good way. I mean, it really is awful. But it’s still the best thing ever to happen to Gansey other than being resurrected by a talking forest, so that’s saying something.”

Adam kicked him under the table, but Ronan caught his foot and pinned it to the floor.

“I like the Pig,” Blue said. “I’m slightly scared I’ll die every time I go somewhere in it, but I like it.”

Noah said, “That’s kind of how I feel about hanging out with you guys.”

 

RONAN

Ronan never woke up screaming.

It was such a stereotypical thing to do, the dreamer awake who woke with terror in his throat and sweat on his face and fingernails clawing his own skin, a scream on his lips.

Ronan never screamed.

He didn’t scream when the night horrors came for him and ripped his skin into shreds. He didn’t scream when the monsters tore his friends and family to pieces. He didn’t scream when the mask peeled the flesh from Adam’s bones.

The dreams were good at what they did, and he had to be better.

Blue had sent him a text message from Gansey’s phone that morning: _it’s blue._ _found a movie, nothing lame. ok for wednesday?_ Ronan had read the message, then shoved his phone into his pocket without replying. Even Blue knew better than to expect him to text back.

Gansey, not to be outdone, had most likely reclaimed his phone and sent Ronan a series of messages: We _’re meeting at Nino’s for lunch if you want to come with. Bring Adam._ When Ronan had ignored the texts, Gansey had called. Ronan let the phone go to voicemail three times before he picked it up.

“The fuck do you want?”

“Did you receive my messages?”

“Who the hell says _receive_ in casual conversation?”

“Ronan.”

Ronan said, “Yeah, I got them.”

“So you’ll be there?”

“Whatever.”

“Bring Adam.”

“What _ever,_ ” Ronan repeated, doing his best imitation of Valley Girl slang. The result was a cross between Adam and Blue, which was only mildly terrifying.

Gansey sighed. “Ronan,” he began.

Ronan hung up.

 

Ronan drove to the church.

He had left Chainsaw, much to her chagrin, in her cage at Monmouth. To appease her somewhat, he had torn a few pages out of his mostly-empty Latin notebook for her to destroy. When he had left, she had been undertaking the task joyously and raucously.

Ronan stomped up the stairs and knocked on Adam’s door. Adam opened it a moment later, looking confused. “Ronan?”

“Gansey wants you to go to Nino’s. Again. I’m supposed to get you.”

Adam frowned. “He keeps forgetting I have a cell phone now.”

There was some unspoken accusation there, some guilt and lack of self-worth. Ronan didn’t want to think about how Adam was handling things, how he was feeling about things, how he was dealing with thing, but he did.

He supposed that was what it was to have friends.

“That’s Gansey for you. Look, are you coming or not? I’m gonna drive you so that shitbox of yours doesn’t fall apart in the church parking lot.”

“Way to be positive, Ronan,” Adam muttered under his breath, but he grabbed a key from the plastic-tub dresser next to the door and followed Ronan out of the tiny apartment, down the stairs, and into the BMW.

 

Everything was Adam’s fault.

Gansey prattled unselfconsciously on and on about what plans he and Blue had for the summer, movies they could see, places they could go, things they could do, and so on. Blue backed up nearly everything he said, except for the ones that cost more than she was willing to spend, and frequently threw her feet up on Gansey’s lap and leaned her head on Noah’s legs, breaking into the conversation by sticking her hand into the air.

Adam leaned his head against the back of the booth and watched them through half-closed eyes. He looked exhausted. Ronan wondered if he was tired involuntarily, from simple lack of sleep, or if it was forced.

Ronan knew what it was like, not to be willing to sleep.

“So I found this movie we could watch,” Blue said, mouth full. “But I would need Ronan’s approval. I will say, it’s my choice this time, so it’s a lot more interesting than the last one. I blame Gansey for the last one.”

Gansey said, “It was not my idea.”

“Oh, sweetie, it was _completely_ your idea. Don’t worry,” Blue said, without sitting up. “If it makes you feel any better, Ronan, there’s explosions and cars and cool guy stuff like that. You’ll love it.”

Adam said, “I think you’re confusing him with Kavinsky.”

It was fucking incredible, how even after all this time, Kavinsky’s name had such an effect on Ronan, how quickly and completely it made him feel like shit. “Shut up, Parrish.”

Adam looked confused. “What did I do this time, huh?”

“Don’t talk about me like you know me,” Ronan snarled. The anger burst from nowhere, flowering under his skin, shoring him with sparks. “And don’t talk about Kavinsky. Got it?”

“Maybe you could stop being an idiot and do something other than bully people to get your way,” Adam said. “Because that’s what Kavinsky did, in case you’d forgotten. You really want to be like him?”

“You don’t know what he was like,” Ronan said. His hands were clenched so tightly into fists that they shook. “You can’t know what he was like.”

“I know he was an asshole. What, did he have hidden depths that I’m missing? Secretly wrote beautiful love poetry? For _you?_ ”

“ _Guys,_ ” Noah wailed. “Don’t _fight._ ”

“You know what? I don’t want to fucking talk about this shit,” Ronan spat. Anger was like a second skin, covering him. He couldn’t shake it off him.“Fuck this. I’m getting out of here.”

He slid out of the bench and stalked towards the door, shoving it open and letting it slam behind him. The sky was growing dark, night spreading like a pool of black ink across the sky. Headlights burned on the highway in the distance, and from somewhere, a lone bird called mournfully.

“Ronan! Wait!”

 _Adam._ Of course.

Ronan spun around, snarling, but Adam started talking before Ronan could say anything. “Look, I’m sorry about what I said, okay? I didn’t mean it. I was just annoyed that you haven’t been doing anything with the rest of us, and then you keep giving me mixed signals, you know? And I don’t want to make you do anything you don’t want to but I think you’re also being a bit of a selfish asshole and it’s not about Kav—”

“What the fuck are you babbling about, Parrish?”

Adam wrapped his arms around himself and stepped over a piece of broken concrete, stopping right in front of Ronan. “I’m sorry about Kavinsky.”

“Don’t be,” Ronan said, deadpan. “He was an asshole.”

“Yeah, I know. That’s what I said. And anyway, we want you to be part of these summer plans, whatever you want to call them, because you’re our friend, got it?”

“You the spokesperson for Gansey, now?”

“I’m the spokesperson for me,” Adam said. “And _I_ want you to be there.”

Ronan scoffed.

“I’m not lying,” Adam said, offended. “I know you don’t like that. You’re just as much a part of the group as any of us.”

“Even Noah?”

“You’re like Noah, only slightly more corporeal.”

“Look at you, talking the big talk,” Ronan sneered, but his pulse hitched. “Guess you’ve been hanging around with Gansey too much recently. You gonna turn into an SAT book like him?”

Adam pursed his lips and frowned. “No, I’m not.”

Ronan raised his eyebrows and inhaled slowly. There was a difference between, as Adam had said, mixed signals and clear ones. It was time to be clear.

He was filled with a sudden anger, unlike the previous, at what he was going to do.

Everything was Adam’s fault.

He leaned in and crashed their mouths together.

Adam made a small sound of surprise, but it wasn’t a bad sound of surprise, just the kind that meant he’d been caught off guard. His arms had been tucked around himself, and he had to push them against Ronan’s chest to free his hands. Adam moved one of his hands up to slide tentatively over the line of Ronan’s jaw, and the other pressed into the space between them, fingers gripping the fabric of Ronan’s shirt.

It was as awkward as Ronan had expected, but somehow that made it better. He didn’t know exactly what to do with his hands, but Adam didn’t either; their lips mashed together, and Adam started laughing, breathy and disbelieving. Ronan almost laughed too. He had no idea what he was doing.

Then his thoughts tumbled dizzyingly back into place.

_I am kissing Adam Parrish._

_I_ want _to kiss Adam Parrish._

Ronan realised, then, what a truly terrible thing he had done.

The sudden realisation of how long he had wanted this, how good it felt, strained against his skin as if it wanted to crawl out of him and into Adam. Ronan could hear the rhythmic beat of blood pounding in his head, and felt sparks bursting in his mouth and along every inch of his body.

It dawned on him that Blue really was missing quite a lot, refusing to kiss Adam.

Adam moved away, and Ronan felt the instantaneous terror of rejection, the fear that he had done something wrong, that he had miscalculated, misunderstood, misinterpreted Adam’s actions, or even Adam himself.

Then Adam grinned and said, “That was not where I thought this was going.”

 _Tell me about it,_ Ronan thought. “Not a bad thing, right?”

Adam kissed him again. “Not a bad thing.”

Ronan closed his eyes and allowed Adam to trace the curves of his cheekbones and chin, and grinned, because he _wanted_ to. Then they kissed again, and Ronan let his hands travel the contours of Adam’s spine, feeling the recklessness rushing of his heart.

“I’m going to go,” Adam said finally, his nose pressed against Ronan’s, “back inside.”

He kissed Ronan again, then turned around and half-ran back towards the rectangle of light that was the door to Nino’s.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations of the boys’ Latin for those not fluent in a language so dead its corpse is desiccated:
> 
> Illud haud sciam: It would not know/He would not know. (Aka Cabeswater is being prophetic and confusing again. Big shocker, eh?)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Gansey wonders. Blue commands. Adam pines. Ronan complains. Noah brings them all together to watch Pitch Perfect, because let's face it, that's a great thing to do.

BLUE (interlude)

“So anyway,” Noah said. “I vote that we watch _Pitch Perfect_.”

Blue stared at him. He was almost completely corporeal, but something about his eyes was off—they were too dark, and reflected no light, and looked flat and empty when he looked at her. He looked like he was trying valiantly not to let on that he was dead.

Thinking about Noah being dead, even though he’d never been anything else as long as she had known him, made Blue’s chest hurt. “Noah, you’ve seen that movie a million times.”

“I know,” Noah said happily. “It’s a good movie. It’s better than what Gansey likes to watch, anyway.”

Gansey looked offended. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Remember when he made us watch that shark documentary,” Noah said gleefully to Blue, “and he _cried._ ”

“Noah, didn’t you . . . _go_ during the movie anyway? I didn’t even think you saw all of it,” Blue interjected, attempting to rescue Gansey from further embarrassment. He had indeed cried during the shark documentary.

“Yeah.” Noah shrugged. “It was super boring.”

“It was _interesting,_ ” Gansey mumbled, mostly to himself.

Blue decided to step in again.

“For now I think we need to just focus on what we’re going to do tomorrow. It’s Sunday, so it can’t be in the morning because Ronan has church, and it can’t be around lunch-time because I have dog walking, but I think the rest of the day is fine. Oh! I don’t know when Adam has to work.”

“Blue,” Noah remarked. “I think your summer would be a lot more fun if you didn’t know exactly what was going to happen every single second of it.” Before Blue could protest, Noah added, “Also where _is_ Adam?”

“He went after Ronan.” Gansey’s thumb made its way to his mouth. “And there haven’t been screams or sirens or explosions, so unless it’s a fast-acting poison, they’re probably still alive.”

“I wouldn’t bet on it,” Noah said gloomily.

As if on cue, the door bell chimed melancholically and Adam stomped back inside. Blue automatically moved a few inches away from Gansey, but Adam didn’t look at the distance between them. He sat down next to Noah and shoved half a slice of pizza in his mouth.

Blue studied him curiously. The difference between Adam and the rest of the world, Blue thought, was that Adam knew about secrets, therefore he knew best of all how to find them. After fights with Ronan, she simmered; Gansey looked harried but resigned; Noah looked less tangible. Adam looked confused. His ears were pink, and he didn’t meet any of their eyes.

Adam had been somewhat disoriented lately, she knew; Blue suspected that the rain storms had altered the path of the ley line, shifting Cabeswater and therefore affecting Adam. But the confusion on his face he always wore after fighting with Ronan was more personal, less-generalised bewilderment.

Blue wondered what kind of a fight it must have been.

Noah broke the silence to announce his movie selection: “We’re going to watch _Pitch Perfect._ ”

Adam looked up and flashed a fractional, unwilling smile. “Hey, I kinda like that movie.”

Henrietta still held a firm grip on his accent, no matter how much Adam attempted to loosen it.

The bell sounded once again, but Ronan didn’t just open the door, he shoved it all the way back until it slammed into the wall. Noah flinched. Eyes sharp and smile sharper, Ronan stalked to their table and threw himself next to Blue, bristling. He looked livid.

Noah started, “We’re going to watch _Pitch Perf—_ ”

“Great,” Ronan growled. “Sounds fucking amazing. Tell me who dies in the end.”

“Oh, no. No,” Blue said, pointing at him. Sometimes the only way to deal with Ronan Lynch when he was like this, Blue had discovered, was to pretend that his bad mood was simply an illusion until finally it became one. “You said you were watching a movie with us.”

“Also no one dies,” Noah added helpfully.

“Except me, when I have to watch that,” Gansey said under his breath.

“Only,” Ronan said, “if you found something that wasn’t shit.”

Noah protested, “ _Pitch Perfect_ isn’t—”

“Yeah, whatever, Czerny.”

“ _Ohhh-kay,_ ” Noah said, making the word a long, drawn-out sigh. “You’re in a pissy mood.”

“Wow, great powers of deduction, Sherlock.”

Gansey held up his hand in the universal signal for _silence, please,_ a gesture probably meant to be less grandiose than it ended up being. “Ronan Lynch. Do not drag us all into this. Make peace with Adam and move on. We can’t expect to work together to find Glendower if we’ve been unable to decide on simple decisions. _Do not fight._ ”

Ronan made a sound that appeared to be a combination of a scoff and sigh and which fully conveyed the complete measure of his real or pretended disinterest.

Adam said, without looking at anyone, “I’m sorry for getting into a fight, here, of all places. And I think it would be best to have these conversations later, somewhere that isn’t here.”

“He only likes to resolve important discussions in the parking lot,” Noah confided to Blue in a conspiratorial whisper, “with Ronan, and—”

“Shut the fuck up, Czerny, unless you want me to throw you out of another window. I swear to God.”

“Oh, and hey,” Noah said casually, deliberately ignoring Ronan. “I learned a new word today when I was messing around with Gansey’s history books and things. Did you know he has an entire encyclopaedia on blue penguins? Anyway, the word is ‘defenestration’.”

“What’s it mean?” asked Blue, trying to inject some sense of normalcy into the conversation.

Noah said, “It means that Ronan is an asshole.”

 

ADAM

When he heard the knock, Adam tried to pretend it wasn’t a relief.

He had always been good at pretending—it was a skill born of necessity, and one which he despised, but it had its small merits in times like these. He sat up but didn’t open the door. “Come in. It’s unlocked.”

“Why the fuck is your door unlocked?”

_Because I was waiting for you to show up._

“I live,” Adam pointed out, “in a church. What kind of idiot would break into a church to steal something?”

“Yeah,” Ronan said, smirking, “who would?”

“Oh, stop it.”

“Fine, fine, your wish is my command, whatever you want, I am your devoted slave, et cetera.”

Adam studied him as Ronan closed the door and turned to face Adam. Ronan looked at home in the apartment, a match for its sharp lines and pointed corners. He was wearing his black hoodie, and the faint rustling noises meant that Chainsaw was nestled in his hood. Adam was rarely afraid of Ronan—he preferred to say _cautious_ or _wary_ instead—but there was something dangerous about him, then.

Adam said, “ _Utinam ne mihi iratus esse._ ”

“I’m not. _Omnes diutius vivere volunt._ ” It was one of the proverbs they had learned, back before every Latin teacher had developed homicidal tendencies— _every man wants to live longer._

“And _that_ ”—Adam couldn’t call a more descriptive word to his aid at the moment to mean ‘making out in the parking lot’—“was supposed to help?”

“Yeah,” Ronan said. He sat down and crossed both his legs and his arms. Chainsaw poked her head out of Ronan’s hood, feathers ruffled and fluffed. Ronan put his hand on her to comfort her.

Adam said, “Is this where we turn cliché and you say we need to have a _talk?_ ”

Ronan looked appalled. “Fuck, no.” He released Chainsaw. “If there’s anything I hate more than Gansey’s stupid plans, then it’s movie-perfect talks and confessions of supposedly-unrequited love that end up leading to making out on the conveniently-located four-poster by candle light.”

“So that’s _not_ what you want? And also I don’t have a four-poster.”

“Thank God. It would be fucking difficult to have a conversation if I was sleeping on the floor and next to a four-poster,” Ronan said. He rearranged his legs absently.

“But it’s not difficult to have a conversation _now?_ ”

“Why, did you want it to be?”

And now Ronan was smirking, holding out his arm for Chainsaw to grudgingly walk down towards his wrist. Adam thought back over everything he had said, searching for possible double entendres he hadn’t meant. _What do you_ want, _Adam?_

“What I want,” Adam said finally, “is to know what the hell is going on with you, Lynch.”

And maybe to repeat whatever had happened in the parking lot at Nino’s, but that was neither here nor there.

Ronan said, “Nothing.”

“Thought you didn’t lie,” Adam said. His neck itched; he did his best not to scratch it. “Thought you always told the truth.”

“I don’t lie. Not lying and telling the truth are really fucking different, Parrish. And it’s not a lie if I don’t know. I don’t know a damn thing any more.”

Chainsaw had tired of Ronan’s ignoring her, and decided to pull the drawstring out of his hoodie. Ronan caught her and shoved her, not unkindly, back into his hood.

Adam said, “So learn.”

Ronan sneered. “It’s not that easy.”

“Why not?” Adam demanded. “You’re the Greywaren. You’re magic. You’re _Ronan Lynch_. You can do whatever goddamn thing you want to do.”

“It’s not that easy,” Ronan repeated.

“So make it be that easy.”

“You think I can just snap my fingers and the world will fucking fall at my feet whenever I want? Look, magic and money don’t mean shit. I thought you of all people would know that much.”

 _No,_ Adam thought, _but magic and money are very useful prerequisites for dealing with what is actually shit._

Chainsaw cawed once, strident, and eyed Adam suspiciously from inside Ronan’s hood. She had recently decided to get over her phase of seeing him as a potential threat, a fact of which Adam was very glad, but she hadn’t moved past the wariness.

Adam said, “Why’d you buy me a cell phone?”

“Oh, not this again.” Ronan stretched out his legs, a languid shadow, uncurled against the wall. “I _told_ you. Already. What is this, the fucking Inquisition?”

“You’ve said different things each time,” Adam pointed out.

“Maybe there’s a lot of reasons and I just didn’t happen to tell you all of them at once, Parrish, did you ever think of that? Maybe I actually plan what I’m going to do before I do it. What a shock, yeah?”

The shock was not that Ronan Lynch was capable of doing, frequently did, and maybe even enjoyed doing nice things for people other than himself.

The shock was that Adam had forgotten.

What was that saying—‘in for a penny, in for a pound’?

Adam said quietly, “You said, ‘plans’.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Yes, you did! Just now you said sometimes you planned what you were going to do before you did it.”

Ronan snorted and somehow managed to convey an air of incredible boredom. “Whatever helps you sleep though the night on your shitty four-poster bed in your shitty apartment, Parrish.”

“I _don’t have a four-poster._ ”

“Yeah,” Ronan agreed. He was grinning, then, suddenly and perplexingly. It was an expression which Adam much preferred to the previous scowl, although he wouldn’t tell Ronan that. “I know.”

“So what’s your point?”

“Shit, Parrish, I thought you said you _didn’t_ want to have a talk.”

“ _You_ were the one who said that,” Adam reminded him. “And we’re talking now, so might as well. I wanted to know why you kept doing nice things and, and buying me things, and sleeping here and showing me the Barns and— _everything._ ”

“I’m a decent fucking human being.”

Adam almost laughed; he made a strangled sound that came from trying not to. “But why me? Why not someone like Gansey?”

“He already has a phone.”

“You know what I mean.”

Ronan pursed his lips and looked down at his hands. Chainsaw protested wordlessly, feathers wild and standing up, from his neck. “I’m not going to lie to you, ’cause that’s a shitty thing to do.”

“Okay.”

“But I’m not going to be able to always tell the whole truth; it’s not even plausible.”

“Okay.”

Ronan said, “Hypothetically.”

“Hypothetically?”

“Hypothetically. Say there’s this guy, for example, with an obsessed best friend who’s really fucking rich, and with a friend who’s smart _and_ a magician, for God’s sake, and with a friend who’s really fucking dead, like literally a ghost, and with another friend who’s ridiculously short—got it?”

“Yeah,” Adam said.

“Ace job, Parrish. Truly spectacular. So this guy, he likes someone—hypothetically, let’s say he likes the magician, the other guy. You know, if this situation were to happen in real life, because it’s obviously theoretical.”

“Obviously.”

It was one thing to think about this, to imagine Ronan saying these things, to imagine himself saying them in return.

It was another thing entirely to witness it happening for real.

Adam said, “You mean if he was stupid enough to like the magician. Hypothetically, I mean.”

“Right,” Ronan agreed. “So he might start doing nice things, because he’s a nice guy, really. And also unbearably sexy, you know. The magician is terribly jealous of his good looks.”

Adam raised his eyebrows. “This is all hypothetical, right?”

“Sure,” Ronan said with good humour. The whole thing felt surreal.

“So you’re saying, hypothetically . . . ,” Adam said, “those things might include paying his rent . . .”

“Maybe,” Ronan said, stroking Chainsaw.

“Or making him a mixtape . . .”

“Possibly.”

“Or buying him a phone . . .”

“It could happen.”

_But it did happen._

“Or maybe,” Adam continued, “kissing him in the parking lot . . . I guess.” He chanced a look at Ronan; both boy and bird were very still, with only a sliver of Chainsaw’s beak visible, and even that might just have been the sharp edges of Ronan’s tattoo. “Is that possible?”

Ronan said, “Yeah.”

“But why . . .”

Ronan scoffed. “Because I fucking wanted to. I’m sorry if your mommy didn’t sign the permission slip.”

And Adam did laugh at that, because of course kissing Ronan Lynch would be an act which would happen to require the signing of a permission slip; it was not something safe. It was like making out with an atom bomb and hoping it wouldn’t blow up.

Adam was used to being around all manners of explosives. What Aglionby had not supplied for him, Gansey’s wild quest for Glendower had. He was quite unafraid of the possibility of disaster; that much was inevitable.

What scared him was how much he wanted it, and not just any old type of disaster— _Ronan’s_ type of disaster, his particular brand of danger, his deadly recklessness, his signature risk.

Ronan Lynch was dangerous in a way that was unlike any other, and it was not difficult at all to see how proud he was of this fact.

Adam said, “Hypothetically . . .”

It was so stupid. So incredibly stupid.

“Hypothetically,” Adam repeated, “if your guy knew that . . . knew that the magician, that he liked him too . . . would he ever want to maybe kiss him . . . again?”

Ronan’s eyebrows shot upwards. He swallowed and resettled Chainsaw before he answered. “Yeah, I think . . . yeah. Yeah, he’d like that. Hypothetically.”

Adam could feel his heart beating in his chest, pounding against his ribcage like a trapped animal, desperate to escape.

_What what there to lose?_

He leaned forwards.

Ronan closed his eyes, and Adam kept leaning until his mouth met Ronan’s, and _there—_

They were kissing.

Again.

Then Ronan jolted away and stood up so quickly he smashed his head into the low ceiling. Chainsaw took flight, startled and furious. Ronan wasted no time saying, in very precise and profane terms, exactly what he thought of the sloped ceilings in Adam’s apartment.

“Shit,” Ronan said, rubbing his shaved head. “Shit. _Fuck,_ Parrish. Just . . . fuck. When I said I didn’t want to talk and end up making out, I kind of thought that meant we weren’t going to talk and end up _making out._ ”

“Sorry,” Adam said. He could feel his ears burning. “To be fair, I don’t think that, um, _that_ would count as actually making out. I think making out is more than just . . . um.”

“Jesus Christ,” Ronan said. “Jesus _Christ._ What the _fuck_ were you thinking.” It wasn’t a question, just a heavy, weary statement. “I didn’t think you were going to actually . . .”

“Sorry,” Adam said again.

“Fuck,” Ronan said, in the exact same way he had just petitioned Jesus. Somehow he managed to make the two words sound both equally horrible and equally holy. “Give me a warning next time, okay, Parrish?”

Adam said, “Something like, ‘I’m going to kiss you now’?”

Ronan scoffed, but he said, “Yeah, sure. Something like that.”

“Okay,” Adam said. He got to his feet, slowly, and walked over to Ronan. They both had to slouch slightly, so as not to hit the ceiling. “I’m going to kiss you now.”

Ronan grinned. “If you insist.”

 

RONAN

Everything was Adam’s fault, as usual.

Gansey certainly shared a great deal of the blame; he had convinced them all to get into the Camaro and allow him to drive. Blue was to blame as well; she had stolen the seat behind Gansey, as well as Gansey’s phone, and refused to keep her mouth or window closed. Noah had unhelpfully disappeared, like the cowardly traitor he was. And Adam—

Adam had taken the shotgun seat, leaving Ronan in the back with Blue and her wild hair and fuzzy scarf, both of which considered it to be their duty and obligation to attack Ronan. Adam had refused to play any music which Ronan considered worth shit, instead allowing Gansey to play some ridiculous alternative coffee-shop music. Adam had rolled down _his_ window, and the breeze had blown his hair in his face and flushed his cheeks pink and Ronan was finding it very difficult to keep a straight face.

 _Who am I kidding?_ thought Ronan wryly. _Nothing about me is straight._

“Jane,” Gansey said, quite calmly considering the situation, “what’s the estimate?”

“Estimate?” said Blue. “What estimate? Was there an estimate?”

Gansey pulled his phone from his pocket without looking and handed it to her. “Check the estimate.”

Blue stuck out her tongue, then spat out a few pieces of her hair. She had decided to dye it blue, to match her name, and it was now streaked with wild, aquamarine strands of colour. Ronan strongly suspected that Noah had helped. “Oh. Okay.”

Adam turned around and said to Ronan, “Later, _apud me pernoctare te oportebit._ ”

Ronan smirked. “ _Ne tibi umquam credidisemus,_ Parrish.”

“I feel excluded,” Gansey said, without taking his eyes from the road. “What did you say? Isn’t _pernoctare_ ‘all night’? No, I don’t want to know what you’re saying, never mind, forget I asked. _Egredior sine te,_ Ronan.”

“He deserves it,” Blue said, as Adam turned red. She pulled herself up so that she was level with the front seat. Gansey and Adam had been teaching her fragments of Latin, when they had time; Ronan normally left Monmouth whenever these impromptu lessons began. “Where are we going?”

“Check the estimate,” Gansey said maddeningly.

“Ten minutes,” Blue said grumpily. “So, by the way—we’re going to that movie I told Ronan about before. The one that didn’t suck?”

“I can’t pay for a ticket,” Adam started.

“Yes, you can,” Blue corrected. “I have money.”

“That’s yours.”

“And I choose to spend it on you. Don’t you feel privileged, Adam Parrish? You ought to. Blue Sargent distributes her gifts rarely and to Aglionby boys even less often. Blue Sargent can do many things, but revoke a gift once offered, no.”

Ronan said, “Can Blue Sargent talk in a normal voice?”

“If Ronan Lynch doesn’t flirt with Adam Parrish in Latin.”

Adam turned red again.

“Blue Sargent ought to mind her own fucking business before she starts to sound like her nosy cousin, no pun intended, and not bother us, no matter what we’re saying, since Gansey’s sense of translation is—”

Gansey shuddered. “Please, don’t even speak of it.”

Ronan scowled and wished for Chainsaw. How odd it was that something born from his own head had such a calming effect on him. “I want to bring Chainsaw next time,” he said aloud, stubborn.

“I think,” Gansey said, “we’ll have to leave the slightly more pinnate female of the group at Monmouth.”

“No one knows what _pinnate_ means, Gansey.”

“Feathered,” Gansey supplied. “Winged.”

“Be careful what you say about Chainsaw,” Noah advised from the back seat. “Ronan can get very testy and possessive of his girlfriend.”

Ronan said, “Chainsaw is not my girlfriend.” At Adam’s incredulous grin, he amended, “She’s actually my wife, we got married when Parrish was working and those two were running around not kissing.”

“Which is all of the time,” Noah muttered unhelpfully.

“And you didn’t invite me to the wedding? I’m hurt,” Gansey said. “I was so looking forward to giving the best-man speech—unless you wanted Adam to do that, of course. It would have been unforgettable.”

“Don’t worry, man, yours would never beat what mine’s gonna be when you and Glendower finally tie the knot. Something like, ‘He waited for hundreds of years to be woken up, like a goddamn fairy tale, and _he_ got himself killed because why the hell not, he’s Gansey, surely you know this by now, but they’re both finally with the only person who can put up with and understand them . . . which is good, because _I_ sure can’t . . .’”

Adam was trying not to laugh, which had been what Ronan was going for. “I don’t think I’ll invite you to my wedding, if I ever get married.”

“You had better,” Blue said fiercely, grabbing the headrest. “All of us.”

“Gansey would cry,” Noah said happily.

“I would not,” Gansey said. “Jane, what about you?”

Blue looked out the window. “I’m never getting married. Curse, remember?”

“That just says you can’t kiss your true love,” Noah argued. “So you just have marry someone who’s _really horrible_ —”

“Thanks,” Blue said quietly, “but I don’t think what would help.”

Ronan had heard about Blue’s no-kissing curse in three ways: from Gansey, who had complained profusely about this lack of kissing over the course of many sleepless nights at Monmouth; from Adam, who had explained it more recently, in an attempt to justify his and Blue’s alleged falling-out; and from Blue herself, who had told Ronan what she called the abridged version, “since everybody else knows.”

It was unfortunate, and Ronan felt bad for her, because it wasn’t fair that _she_ was the one with the curse. Even if she wanted to kiss Gansey, which showed her questionable taste in men (“As if yours is better,” Blue had argued when he’d mentioned it to her, “remember Kavinsky?”). It still sucked.

“If it helps,” Noah said, “I’m not going to get married, either, so later we can live together in an apartment here or something, and laugh at the rest of them and design clothes or something and have eleven dogs.”

“You’re a _ghost,_ ” Ronan reminded him. “You can’t get married if nobody can _see_ you.”

“Don’t hate,” Noah said, offended.

Gansey, who had been avoiding looking at any of them, tapped his fingers authoritatively on the steering wheel. “When I get married, I’m not inviting anyone. Maybe you guys. But if Helen knew, she would make a big deal out of it, and I don’t want that. So, something small.”

“If I get married,” Adam said, “I’ll let Blue and Noah be in charge of decorations, and,” as Blue grinned widely, “Blue can plan as much as she wants; I’ll even let her plan my honeymoon and the colour of the napkins, if she wants to.”

Noah said blissfully, _“Glitter.”_

“Chainsaw could help; she’s good with shiny things,” Blue added. “If Ronan could bear for her to be out of his sight.”

“This conversation is ridiculous,” Ronan said.

“None of you can design my wedding,” Gansey said, unfocused. “There will be no designing. No planning. Just _doing,_ and then it’s over and no worries. No advance planning, no anything, unless Blue wants to do that, but I won’t be in charge for once. We’re here.”

Blue vaulted out of the car and slammed the door in a way that would have made Ronan proud had it not been the Pig. She considered tossing Gansey’s phone back to him, then wisely changed her mind and slipped it into his pocket for him. “Okay, let’s go.”

Adam caught Ronan’s eye for a moment and mumbled, “ _Discedere dum possumus debemus._ ”

“I heard that!” said Blue loudly. “I don’t know what you said, but whatever it is, no!”

Ronan closed his eyes briefly and resigned himself to a life of torment.

 

The movie was better than expected: Blue had been right, in that respect. While her sense of taste was questionable in certain areas, Ronan mused, those certain areas generally including clothing and Gansey, her taste in films was passable.

Halfway through, Blue rested her head on Gansey’s shoulder and made a soft, sighing noise. Gansey shot Adam a look, but Adam kept his gaze determinedly on the screen. Ronan considered asking, then decided no, it wasn’t worth it, he didn’t want to know.

He watched Blue. She was a paradox in her own right, an experiment in something so large taking up the space of something so small, but her place at Gansey’s side was something Ronan no longer wanted to dispute.

Then he watched Adam, but didn’t look away when Adam glanced over and caught him at it. _I’m allowed to do this now,_ Ronan thought, stupidly, foolishly. He raised his eyebrows at Adam until Adam looked away.

It was a deeply satisfying feeling. He wished again for Chainsaw, just to have something familiar, some part of him, to share the moment with, but there was no way scavenger birds would be allowed in movie theatres, even if they had had a stupid conversation about it.

 _What’s the difference,_ Ronan wondered, _between allowing in a visible monster and allowing in an invisible one?_

The difference was that he was allowed in to most places.

It wasn’t fucking fair, and not just for Chainsaw, who probably didn’t want to see a movie in the first place. It just wasn’t fair.

 

ADAM

Only a small part of Adam had raged against the sight of Blue’s head on Gansey’s shoulder.

It was a small part, but it still had a powerful voice. Adam was trying not to feed it, to perpetuate the monster, but it could live for a while without his aid. What Adam was trying to teach himself was how to feed the parts of him he wanted to live while starving the others.

And maybe he had a lot to learn, but maybe that was understandable, and maybe it was okay too.

 

Gansey, apparently remembering that Adam was now in possession of a cell phone, decided to text him at six in the morning, which was too early even for Adam, who, unlike Gansey and Ronan, slept through the night.

For Adam, the problem was not the _sleeping._ The problem was the _waking up._

But whatever the problem was, Gansey texted him, and his phone made an annoyingly loud chirping noise that turned out to be a very effective alarm. Adam groaned and grabbed the phone, momentarily blinded by the brightness of the screen, and squinted at the message.

 

 _From:_ the rich king-obsessed dick

 _To:_ Adam Parrish

 _Message:_ Are you awake?

 

Adam groaned again, which made him feel marginally better.

 

 _From:_ Adam Parrish

 _To:_ the rick king-obsessed dick

 _Message:_ no.

 

But he knew that Gansey probably wanted him for something, so Adam slowly sat up and began the irritatingly slow process of finding the light switch. After a while in the apartment, he had nearly mastered the dance of moving across the floor without making the floorboards creak or stepping on a loose nail or sharp bit of wood, but he sometimes faltered.

The light switch was, reassuringly, in the same place it always was.

 

 _From:_ not the red cross

 _To:_ Adam Parrish

 _Message:_ parrish tell gansey to stop fucking texting me im literally in the fucking room next to him

 

 _From:_ Adam Parrish

 _To:_ the rich king-obsessed dick

 _Message:_ ronan says to stop texting him, with more adjectives than that

 

 _From:_ the rich king-obsessed dick

 _To:_ Adam Parrish

 _Message:_ Call me?

 

Adam called Gansey.

“I have had almost three years to teach him how to use a cell phone in lieu of communicating through second-hand profanity,” Gansey said, instead of a greeting. “Where did I go wrong?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he’s unteachable. I’m not the resident expert on Ronan,” Adam said, wondering if, now, he was. “Why did you call me at”—he squinted at the digital clock—“six-fifteen in the morning?”

“Oh,” Gansey said mildly, as if hadn’t been one of his main concerns. “I was just wondering whether you had any plans for the day.”

Adam considered hanging up, but knew he wouldn’t do something like that. “Gansey. I have work. I have nothing else. Why? Did you have plans? Of course you do. What did Blue do this time?”

“Nothing,” Gansey said. “Noah wants to watch _Pitch Perfect_ at Monmouth later. Other than that, no.”

“So you called me . . . why?”

“I was awake,” Gansey said, “and couldn’t sleep, and Ronan is being unhelpful as always, so I remembered you had a cellular phone now and so I texted you.”

“Gansey, no one says _cellular_ in casual conversation.”

“Right, quite right,” Gansey said distractedly. “Educate me with your superior English skills. I’m unused to communicating with the locals. Tell me more of this common dialect.”

“I’m going back to bed. You should, too. Try to sleep. You’re being weird.”

“Yes, of course,” Gansey said.

“Go. To. Bed.”

Gansey exhaled and said, “I’m sorry about Blue.”

“I’ve already told you I don’t mind.”

“I know,” Gansey said. “But it’s the friend thing to do. I know _that_ much.”

“Gansey,” Adam said. He couldn’t find the right words for what he wanted to say; he didn’t know how to convey the magnitude of his affection for this friendship, this impossible group of people. He loved them all so much. He couldn’t believe he hadn’t realised that before.

 _This is what I will miss,_ Adam thought. _These late-night phone calls. This camaraderie. These people. This town. This place. This life. I will miss it, if I have to leave it behind. I don’t want to._

“Adam?”

“Go to bed.”

 

Noah was far too invested in the idea of watching _Pitch Perfect,_ in Adam’s opinion, but Blue appeared to be delighted. Gansey had called 300 Fox Way and gotten Calla, and while he cringed and stammered under the fury of Calla’s early-morning temper, Adam found Ronan and Noah sitting on the couch.

Or, at least, Noah was sitting—Ronan was lying on the back of the couch, explaining to Noah something that Adam couldn’t and didn’t want to follow; he gathered that it had something to do with explosives and stunt work. Adam hoped he wouldn’t be the one to gather the two of them from the pavement when it was all over.

Noah looked up and said, “Adam! Gansey’s being assaulted.”

“I heard,” Adam said, holding up his hand for a fist bump, which Noah gave him unselfconsciously. “Calla? I guessed. Does that mean Blue won’t be here to watch the movie with us?”

“No, she’ll be here,” Ronan said from the back of the couch, “but Gansey has to fight the dragon to get to the castle, and the dragon is _in_ the castle, so there’s not much luck there. Or he can attempt to placate the dragon with poetry and facts, which he has been mangling very completely.”

“Oh. Fun.” Adam didn’t envy Gansey the position.

Ronan raised his eyebrows, a gesture somewhat lacking in force, since he was lying on the back of the couch.

Adam really needed to stop staring.

“Do you need a moment?” Noah said slyly.

Ronan shoved Noah off the couch; Noah, clearly solid enough to be touched, yelped as he tumbled onto the floor and scrambled back up, hair messed-up on one side, eyes wide.

“You shoved me!”

“Better than throwing you out a window.”

“Nah, that was fun.” Noah shrugged.

Gansey returned, rescuing Adam.

“Blue will be over in a moment, as soon as she has convinced her mother that she doesn’t need to do all of the chores in her house,” Gansey explained. “She doesn’t, naturally, but Calla is quite determined that Blue be more, um, _responsible._ That’s been going about as well as you’d expect. Adam! When did you get here?”

“He’s been here all along; he’s integrated himself into the woodwork,” Ronan said.

Gansey frowned, but his eyes were smiling. “Oh, excellent. He’ll be able to tell us all sorts of useful things. Tell us, Adam, why do the hinges on the doors creak even after being oiled repeatedly?”

“It’s Cabeswater’s fault,” Adam said, playing along.

Ronan glared at him, managing to preserve the integrity of glaring while draped over the back of the couch. “Don’t diss my magic forest.”

“Hey, it’s my magic forest, too,” Adam pointed out.

“Our magic forest,” Ronan agreed. “No sharing with the lowly normal people.”

Gansey said, “Could the two of you be any more six?”

“You’re the one grinning like an idiot because your crush is coming over to watch a movie, which is, by the way, a fucking terrible idea if you want to get to know someone. Not much chance to talk during a movie. Taking them to dinner is better. I can’t believe _I’m_ teaching _you_ how to go on a date. Although I don’t think it counts if we’re _all_ here.”

“I’ve had dates before,” Gansey said defensively.

Noah started laughing; Adam had almost forgotten the other boy was still sitting on the floor. “Remember Nicole?”

Adam remembered Nicole. She had been Gansey’s girlfriend at the time at which Adam had met him. She had been very pretty, with long, caramel hair and piercing chocolate eyes. Adam had been terrified of her. Gansey had taken her on very few dates; Nicole had dumped him after he, according to them both, “wouldn’t shut up about Welsh stuff.” Gansey hadn’t seemed to mind.

“I thought we had agreed,” Gansey said, shooting Noah a pointed look, “to never mention that again.”

Apart from the disagreements over Welsh lore, Nicole had also been horrified by the Pig, frightened of Ronan, and unable to see Noah. Although, Adam thought, at the time he had probably just assumed she was being rude.

If it came down to it, Adam preferred Blue.

“Noah,” Gansey said. “Do we actually have a disc copy of _Pitch Perfect,_ or are we using Netflix again?”

Noah pouted. “You _said_ I could use the Netflix.”

“Not for an all-day marathon of _Doctor Who._ ”

“Hey,” Ronan said. “That was fun.”

Adam decided not to ask.

“Yes, we have the disc,” Noah said, sounding offended. “It’s in Ronan’s room?”

Gansey said, “Why is it in Ronan’s room?”

Noah blushed, which meant his pale cheeks turned slightly less pale. “I like to watch Netflix when you guys are at school, sometimes. I’ll go get it.” He scrambled to his feet and skipped towards their bedrooms.

Blue arrived momentarily, while Noah was still searching. “What are those ungodly noises?” she asked, returning the hug Gansey gave her. “Where’s Noah?”

“Making ungodly noises,” Ronan muttered. “He better not be in my room still.”

“Oh, hello, Ronan. Why are you lying on the back of the couch? Gansey, stop, your nose is cold.”

Ronan sat up from the couch. “Do couple-y stuff. I’m going to feed Chainsaw. Parrish?”

Adam raised his eyebrows.

“Go,” Blue said, making a shooing motion with her hand. “Do couple-y stuff.”

Gansey spluttered out a combination of dispute and agreement.

Blue grinned. “Seriously, go.”

Chainsaw was carrying small beads across the dresser and depositing them into a pile. When Ronan opened the door, Noah nowhere in sight, Chainsaw froze and tried to hide the beads.

“Yeah, I see you, thief,” Ronan scolded, walking over to the window. “Stop eating jewellery and go hunt, okay?”

Chainsaw gave him a look of deepest disgust and flew out the window.

“That’s it?” said Adam. He felt betrayed. “That’s all you have to do, to feed her?”

“She’s a big girl now. She can hunt for herself,” Ronan said. It was impossible to know if he was being sarcastic or not. He peered out the window, then back at Adam. “Actually I was thinking we could leave Gansey alone with Blue so they don’t, you know, annoy the hell out of us during the movie. And maybe we could talk.”

“Talk?”

“Yeah, Parrish, you know, that thing you do with your mouth where you—”

Adam kissed him.

“Or, you know, we could do that too,” Ronan said. His voice was slightly muffled, but he was grinning.

“Did you actually want to talk?”

“I think,” Ronan said, “it can wait.”

Adam kissed him again, and allowed himself to think: _this is what I have. This is what I want. This is my own choice._

“You’re super romantic,” Noah said happily.

Ronan swore at him. “Fucking _hell,_ Czerny! Is _privacy_ not a word in your limited spectral vocabulary?”

Noah shrugged and held up a disc. “Movie.”

“Out,” Ronan demanded, pointing at the door.

Noah stuck out his tongue but slouched out _. “Rude.”_

 

Blue had curled up on the couch with her arms wrapped around a pillow. Noah was sitting next to her, his head on her shoulder. Gansey looked as reasonably/unreasonably jealous as expected. Blue looked up and smiled at Adam, happy and content. It only hurt a little bit, and it wasn’t the kind of injury that could be healed so quickly.

“Noah found the movie,” Blue said unnecessarily. She gestured to the couch. “Have a seat.”

Gansey sat down next to Blue, with Noah in between them.

“Gansey, I hate to say it,” Ronan said, “but you’re being cockblocked by a ghost.”

“ _Ronan,_ ” Adam hissed.

Noah didn’t look offended.

“Are we gonna start the movie or what?” asked Blue. She tugged Noah and Gansey closer. “I came here to hang out, not . . . um. Talk?”

“Yeah,” Adam said. He sat down on the couch next to Gansey, and Ronan took the last spot. There was barely enough room, and they were all crammed against each other, but no one seemed to mind.

“Okay,” Blue said. “Go.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Translations of the boys’ Latin for those not as absorbed into Cabeswater (aka most of the rest of us):
> 
> Utinam ne mihi iratus esse. (I wish that you were not angry with me.)  
> Omnes diutius vivere volunt. (Every man wants to live longer.)  
> Apud me pernoctare te oportebit. (You should spend the night at my place.) [Note: 'pernoctare' DOES mean 'all night', thank you Gansey, but it can also mean 'during the night' or 'through the night.' Adam is not as dirty-minded as Gansey thinks.]  
> Ne tibi umquam credidisemus. (We never should have trusted you.)  
> Egredior sine te. (I'm leaving [here] without you.)  
> Discedere dum possumus debemus. (We should leave while we can.)
> 
>  
> 
> Tumblr: mochi-jupe-jaune.tumblr.com

**Author's Note:**

> [Tumblr](spacestationtrustfund.tumblr.com).


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